Re: Sound Design
the suggestion of Soundminer is a good one. there are people, including myself, who still us Gallery's mTools. for me, it is fine. but, most would recommend soundminer.
but that is not all of what you are asking. you seem to be bemoaning the, what i call, "hit and run" technique of sound design. like Col. Kilgore tossing playing cards onto dead bodies.
look, people like walter murch do a lot of thinking. this should get you thinking too. you need to dig into the film and develop your own ways of thinking about the sound. what atmospheres will you use and why. hey, even though technically they were not fantastic, satyajit ray had some conceptually effective soundtracks. buying a bunch of new toys and plug-ins may help, but there is a lot you can do even if the money is tight, just be ingenius, and unique!
use some recording gear and record ALL of your own sounds : backgrounds, effects, foley. listen for unusual things that you can find in shops, second-hand stores, on the street, around the house, in someone's workplace. pull out that old analog machine for all kinds of games that you can't play with digital. dig deeper into the tools you already have. PEAK has a built in convolve function; use a convolution reverb in an unusual way; get free plug-ins like Tape-Head; explore the plug-ins and pull out those old digital boxes that you already have. experiement with them. find new ways of using them. use them "wrong". record with tubes and buckets on the mic. think metaphorically. put in sounds that fit conceptually but do not match concretely.
designing is a state of mind, not contest of how many toys you have.
reember, walter murch did "american graffitti" in mono.
(that said, i can be a snob about using good gear. my ears hear the difference and i love using the best. so start with a Sound Devices unit and some Schoeps or Sanken or DPA microphones and collect your own stuff)
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