I have been very excited to use Apple's aperture for a long time since hearing about it, but when i tried the version 1.5, I was turned off.The learning curve was too much for me and i found the interface not too intuitive. When i used  Adobe's Lightroom for the first time...I got hooked. The workflow was perfect for me, and I found it very easy to import images from my cf card, rate my photos, and quickly batch edit the images for  exporting to my target sizes and burning it for submission to my clients.Color corrections and global enhancements was a breeze. The Aperture program just lay there on my hard disk like a fat lazy something...when the 2,0,1 came out I installed the 30-day demo version and renamed my licensed version. I started enjoying it more because it adopted my favorite tool, Lightroom's vignette, highlight recovery, etc.  

When I stumbled on  the featured video of Nat Geo's Jim Richardson explaining his workflow using Aperture... i was really amazed! I didn't realize that it was the tool I'll ever need in doing photo stories. i will be using it more from now on.. especially since the 2.1 version came pre-installed with a dodge and burn" plugin...Awesome!!