Avid Media Composer 5.5.3 upgrade question

[Astral_Rejection]

I use Avid Media Composer 5.5.1 on a Mac running 10.6.8. I’d like to update to 10.7, but my version of Media Composer doesn’t support Lion. A little while back, Avid released 5.5.3, which DOES support Lion. Excellent, I’m ready to upgrade now.

Except, it’s not that easy. I took a quick glance at their forums and readmes, and I’m fairly confused. This is what the patch announcement looks like:

@the avid forums

This release is compatible with Mac OS X 10.6.7, 10.6.8 v1.1, and 10.7.0 (Lion). NOTE: 10.7 is only qualified for local storage at this time. The 10.7.1 update released August 16, 2011 is also not supported at this time.

This is a maintenance release that is free to all owners of Media Composer 5.5 software. It includes over 75 bug fixes, including new plug-ins for the AJA io Express that corrects the “Legends Audio Communications Error. Hardware Underrun” errors. You should consult the README before installing the software.

It also contains 30-day trials of both ScriptSync and PhraseFind.

As always, please deactivate your software, uninstall the previous version, install 5.5.3, activate your software.

So the patch is compatible with my current operating system, but not quite the operating system I want to upgrade to. Further, they suggest completely uninstalling my copy of Avid and reinstalling, and that’s kind of a hassle.

Adding to the general confusion is that in the past, Avid claimed MC 5.5 flat out didn’t work with Mac OS 10.6, but (due to no other options) I installed it anyway, and it worked fine.

My question to you guys: Will MC 5.5.3 work with Mac OS 10.7.1? Do I really have to uninstall MC before upgrading? Just out of curiosity, why doesn’t Avid support a true patching process, instead of full installs? Anything else I need to know before I tackle this upgrade?