No Auggie, it ain't just you. Pro titler is very unintuitive. I don't know, are any of you Mac users? Is the ProTitler UI more Mac-like than Win-like?
Just another example that drove me crazy; when you open one of the effects tabs how do you close the dialog? There's no X in the upper right, there's no "close" link, yeah it should be abundantly clear to all that to close it you have to click the tab again. Clear to whom?
Just leave the text white under that place a generator colour gradient then multiply mask on top make parent the colour is under so set that to anything you want and scale it to whatever