@Ireal
Cool. Let us know how EX performs when you manage to wrangle a copy.
As it stands, I'm currently using a combo of Photoshop and CSP. Photoshop has a stronger text function, (you can, for instance, reduce the leading between lines to however small you want it whereas CSP can only reduce the line space to a certain minimum amount, which for my needs remains too large for the comic font I use). Also, the selection/lasso function in PS is far more adaptive, making it fast and easy to drop in gray tones. But CSP offers far superior drawing tools, and I love using it for basic drawing/inking where Photoshop is rather clumsy. CSP can also rotate the canvas easily without the need for a high-end graphics card. Photoshop won't let me rotate the canvas on my old Tablet PC!
So I do basic layouts in Photoshop and then export to CSP where I do all the drawing/inking. I do frequent saves while working using CSP's native .lip format before at last exporting back to PS where I put in the gray tones and perform the final pre-press work. (It's far better, I find, to put in gray tones with Photoshop, save as .tif or .pdf files and allow the print agency to interpret those grays at the highest level of DPI their machines can output, (usually around 2400 - 3600 dpi), rather than create them yourself as 300 - 600 dpi bitmap screen tones in the image itself; I can always spot a homemade job because the screen tones come out slightly jaggy rather than being made of perfectly round dots.)
Also, Photoshop has much stronger file format control; you can output all the major file types used by professional printing agencies with a high level of reliable space and speed efficiency. PS offers the ability to tweak how a file is saved within a particular format, allowing you to toggle compression algorithms, etc., which I find essential.
Photoshop is also rock-solid. I've not had a crash or freeze-up with that program in years, whereas CSP has left me stranded a couple of times with a frozen machine. (I think it's a memory issue or perhaps a result of using my older hardware and OS.) As well, Photoshop can zoom in and out much more quickly where CSP will hang for a second or two sometimes when navigating the canvas.
I think in time that CSP can benefit from future revisions; it's still a very young program which, while well-featured and enormously clever, doesn't have the level of refinement Adobe has been able to give their premier art program over the last twenty years of development. Twenty years of tweaking makes a difference!