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>I agree with you here. (Hard to believe, huh *g*). Both products can be used to produce great applications, components, etc. It really comes down to the skills of the developer...not the tool being used.
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>I think you have to take a combinatin of the two. And further, it is a sliding scale. For example,there may be one feature in a product that makes it a compelling alternative. The skills of the developer notwithstanding, he/she may have to learn that tool because of that one feature.

I'll agree again. (hmmm... we better be careful here John. We could be starting something new *g*). One of my first programming jobs had me working with VAX BASIC. I had to read data files that had packed decimal. It was ugly stuff. I look back now and think, "It would have been really nice if I could have written an COM component in COBOL and passed the data back in ADO". Granted, I was on a VAX and COM wasn't around back then, but I think it's a perfect example.