God damn this was a big oof. Pasting was inadvertently making duplicates of the footage node(s) every single time. Worst case was if the clip was connected to a nested sequence. Every time someone copy/pasted in my large-scale project, it would add another 1000 nodes to the project. It's about fucking time this was fixed.
XML can seriously balloon out of control with larger projects, but since it's text, it can be compressed very heavily.
We should perhaps provide a project decompression function to allow people to continue editing the XML if they want.
This seems to address a bug where sometimes QXmlStreamWriter would insert nonsense null characters into a project. This is probably some real edge case like compiler optimization or some bullshit like that. I don't even know if it affects all platforms, but it definitely affected me.
Mike Solar