I would have liked to have gotten in on the pay version but did not have the money in the short period they were offering it. I emailed Wes after the fact asking if I could get in and got no response.
I would not mind switching to a linux based MC but only if there are enough plugins already available to make is as good as XL. If we found one that had a good strong list of contributers/programmers I would switch.
I loved the fact that before XL went commercial Steven was always on the board and releasing updates to what people were actually asking for not just what he wanted to add...but I do understand why he could not keep up with that.
I think someone mentioned a while back that it would have been nice to have one more update to the "free" XL to fix a few of the bugs...that would be nice