New Roto Brush in CS5. Worth the upgrade?

Question

I'm sure everyone by now has seen presentations of the new AE CS5. Besides native support for 64-bit platforms, they introduced a very appealing feature called Roto Brush. Besides Adobe employees telling "how great it is", did anyone outside Adobe try it? What do you think, is it really that intuitive? And, is it worth $300 for an upgrade?

Answer 1

As for my previous claim about Ps being on the forefront of Adobe's innovations, then take a look, there are so many things that Ps has that AE doesn't, for instance: range of (handy) selection tools, or cloning brushes, or layer grouping would be just a few off the top of my head. So, no offense, but Ps is way ahead of AE in that sense. (Again I understand that I cannot compare two side by side, since they both work with different media. I'm simply pointing out those nifty tools that Ps has, that would be very nice to have in AE.)
So is it just me, or anyone else feels the same?
I think you are getting yourself to worked up over this and not considering many quite specific things. Software engineering is a complex process (which you as a programmer should know) and doesn't mean just linking a few source files and compiling them. There are different APIs at work here and just the addition of time as a concept complicates matters a bazillion times. Or do you think PS selection tools would be of any use if the only produced jittery output because they did no temporal smoothing? Equally, "Groups" can mean a whole lot of differnt things and adding such a feature will have to be carefully weighed against things like rendering order and the whole concept of how AE structures projects. Would groups be just a meta structure to bundle existing property streams? A whole new way of working? Eliminate pre-comping? Please think about this. Blnaket statements as to one program being behind another are neither fair nor are the in any way correct after the fact. and last but not least, do not forget the human resource factor: Only so many people are working on any given program. Compared to a flagship app like Photoshop that keeps 300 people busy, AE with its 50 people (just do an Alt+click on the About to get a list), of which only a part are the actual programmers, has much less resources and I think it's still amazing, that they can manage to maintain the app on 2 platforms and handle of a bazillion media formats. Yes, AE has its flaws, but it's not that you cannot get anything done with it, is it? I also find such discussions insincere in that you are free to choose your tools and if you are unhappy with AE, you can always try Nuke, Fusion, toxik* or whatever.... Nobody is forcing you to work with Adobe programs.
Mylenium