Is it just me or is the Z5 extremely front heavy and awkward to hold for long periods?
Anyone suggest a good shoulder mount?

It's not just you. The large FP975 batteries can help with the front-rear balance but add substantially to the overall weight. The big batteries make My FX1000 and NX5 cameras awkward in a different way. If I did more hand-held shooting, I would probably look at a shoulder brace but, for now, a monopod works for me.

Let me add another thought to my essay. This is why I would think about getting a Ninja rather than an MRC.

I mainly shoot from tripods, so the size and positioning of of the Ninja would not be a problem for me. I do a lot of multi-cam shoots. When I have the time, I often convert my HDV and AVCHD footage to Cineform AVI. This allows for easier color matching and, when running a seven track multi-cam edit in PPro, the conversions make for a lighter load on the system. (I have an array of disks and RAIDS so the requisite disk space is not a limitation for me.) Using Ninjas and ProRes would save some of the transcoding time and make camera matching easier.

So, If I did not already have MRC units, that is why I would be looking at the Ninjas rather than the MRC units.

Just to revisit the Ninja/MRC debate again. I recently have been ingesting my MRC m2T files with an editor into FCP and the amount of time they take to transcode into Pro-res via mediastream is extraordinarily long - does anyone else get this?
Mediastream seems to transcode each file and make it 5 times bigger when it's turned into pro-res? My editor mate recently transcoded about 50 files in a batch and it came out as one big 140gb file that was unreadable?
Anyway, I digress...for pro-res editing in FCP Ninja may be the way to go perhaps? However I use PPRO5.5 so not sure I want to go there at all.
Anyone heard about the recent NInja 2 release?