I came this || close to buying Expression Studio for a team member last week. :/

The problem is that Microsoft still doesn't communicate it's big vision to developers at large. There's a lot of dead ends and blind alleys that people get led into...

I'm currently commited 80% timewise to the MS stack, but over the last decade alternatives have matured, and attitudes among the folks with the purse strings have changed towards other tech options in the marketplace. It was another weird quirk of timing that I read this news about Expression while installing various Python packages on a Linux box...