[kochbeck]

I absolutely loathe MS Project, but for large projects it does one thing well that I haven't found in other desktop packages: it does a passable job of supporting effort-based planning. There are lots of good enterprise-class planning projects like HP PPM and whatever Oracle renamed Primavera to. But they're very expensive.

Since I went Mac, I began running MS Project under Crossover Office. It's un-Macish and still just as awful, but it works.