Bacardi

Well, Corel bought Xara to get its ease of use and its incredible transparancy options, resold it later, and I, well, I personally don't like Photoshop's vector tools at all. In fact: I would LOVE it if Photoshop had the Macromedia MX interface for Windows, but then I'm a real heretic and will soon be burnt at the stake.
I confess that I dare to prefer Fireworks to ImageReady.

I also know that an older version of Freehand has been given away for free with a magazine, but I cannot remember which one (I think it was Computer Arts).

Anyways: I keep on searching for a solution to this problem. Who knows what can come out of the box.

What exactly are you planning to do with the path tools?

Sark

I tried Xara X and liked it, but it wasn't sufficiently different enought from CorelDraw to encourage me to change. The gaussian blur would be a nice feature though, something Corel still haven't implimented even in version 12 apparently.

Mostly, for creating elements in Draw for filling/manipulating in PS was my intention. The path to selection to alpha channel and back to selection offers a lot of versatility.

Also, it can be useful for selecting bitmaps. Outlining in Draw, converting to an alpha channel in PS to smooth the selection prior to extracting. I know there are other ways of doing this, but it can be useful for some situations especially when you're familar with the tools in Draw.

Sark