OK, lets face it... Freehand has been kicked, punched and beaten, and if that were not enough OSX 6 kicked Freehand in it's balls so hard they went to the roof of it's mouth. But after all that ...it still works... and for me it still works good. Like the little Energizer bunny Freehand keeps going and going and going.
I have been a loyal Freehand user since back in the day when Aldus ran the show. I dabbled with Illustraor now and then, but really felt like things just worked better in Freehand. The selection tool and how it works (multiple selections, sub selections, etc.) is frankly superior. The concept of "clipping path" horrifies me, "paste inside" the obvious choice. Line tools, contour, advanced blend commands... All just better in Freehand.
Don't even get me started on Pantone swatch selection... Do you really need to load the entire library of color? CHRIST!
Not to toot my own horn or anything, but... I am a successful designer and I own my own studio... and in the Designers Universe I have done very well over the years (He knocks on wood). How? you may ask... how is it that username Tvc152k has done so well over the last 15 years? Well all I can say is... you guested it... Freehand.
Freehand is my tool of choice from 8 AM to 6 PM Monday through Friday. So in essence it assisting me in paying for my employees, which in turn boost the economy that the Bush fried. It allows me to create the logo for Company X, so they can feel good about themselves. It helps me design Product X and create the packaging that sells it, if it could also do the marketing function, we'd all be better off. It creates amazingly complex diagrams and instruction manuals with ease so people can put Product X together after they try to assemble it with out looking at the manual first. It creates multiple page catalogs so comapanies can sell things, I could go on and on, but I won't.
Freehand also plays well with others, did you ever notice that. I willing accepts data from Illustrator and Photoshop via cut and paste (well at least it did up to that OSX 6 balls kicking incident). It paste into Photoshop so good that Illustrator got pissed and stop accepting data from it... Illustrator eased up a bit and started accepting Freehand's saved files, but it is still a tender spot with Illustrator and he's not ready to forgive just yet.
Anyhow, all I can say is that dickheads that make the decisions around here obviously don't get the point. But my decision is as follows... If I need to be running OSX for the next 25 years I will, Freehand is not going to die anytime soon on my watch, in fact it will only die when... as my buddy Charleston used to say, "they pry the installation disc it from my cold dead hands".