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A Macworld review once said that Stone didn't know how to build software for the professional graphic market...
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That statement may become terribly ironic for reasons I cannot say.
Yeah, I remember that MacWorld review. That was when OS X just came out, and the reviewer criticized the Cocoa behaviors in the Stone Studio suite. Four years later, and look what the standard behaviors are.
Anyway, a lot of the Stone stuff requires a good amount of polish in terms of their looks, especially the example elements that are usually provided. I'm trying to help with that, but being a moonlighting thing, and since I don't actually code anything, it doesn't come quickly or easily.
Besides, the Stone tools including Create aren't aimed at the professional market. They would get creamed by 800 lb. gorillas with staff and money resources that are literally several orders of magnitude larger. Andrew is getting a lot of pressure to step in where Freehand will likely will no longer exist. Create is meant for people who want more flexibility than a color-by-numbers template approach (Pages) but can't justify the cost or learning curve of Illustrator, Dreamweaver, InDesign, etc. Stone is limited in its resources, but provides tools that go along way towards what these guys provide, and perhaps more importanly they are extremely nimble to user requests (depending on the scope of the request sometimes) and support.
Anyway, If Stone could afford to make a real PS killer, it would have bought TIFFany already. iMaginator only became viable because Apple made it viable by supplying CoreImage to the developer community. That's true for all of Stone's products. If Apple didn't supply many if not most of the tools to build on, a company like Stone probably couldn't make ends meet. It's hard enough with the support Apple does give now (and sometimes Apple's giving is a bit fickle).
Kick: Stone is still in the hippie section of Albuquerque. Ain't teh 1n43rw3b gr8? You should see my Mail inbox with all the back-and-forth between Andrew, Kris, TB, and myself.