I jumped and paid about $45 CAD for Subtitle Edit Pro. I thought it was a lot of money but after struggling with all the awkward java freeware, SEP is the only subtitle creation and editing tool which works at all intuitively in terms of synchronising words and text. You just drag and drop on a moving timeline. To shorten a subtitle or lengthen it, you only need to pull the start or end bubble further along a visual audio waveform. Couldn't be easier.
The hard burning of subtitles does not work in my version. If you'd prefer to soft add your subtitles (generally better for an Apple audience or those with current computers and AV players), it's not part of SEP.
To add soft subtitles, these same guys also have Subtitle Writer. An additional $5 to $10 and it looks really awkward. Fortunately there's a much better freeware program. The best application to mux soft subtitles is Subler which has existed for many years. Previous versions even run on old versions of OS X. I don't have a recommendation for hard coding subtitles yet.
If money is an issue, some of my colleagues have developed a method of using YouTube to create subtitled video. Don't worry, your videos will never be public and you can delete them after creating the subtitles. https://foliovision.com/2017/02/youtube-subtitle-auto-transcribing
While free and a good subtitle creation tool, YouTube's subtitler is not as flexible as SEP though, especially if you delete the videos (it would mean reuploading everything to revise). And anything on YouTube belongs to US security agencies so SEP might work better for you, as it does for me.