'just thought I'd post an update.
First off, thanks for all the feedback. I did go ahead and buy it. I also pulled the trigger on the VOTA Expansion Pack. I ordered it from B&H Photo in NY City. B&H had it in stock and UPS shipping was reasonable. I had it in a couple of days. (The expansion was a download from Soundsonline and was also half price).
While the instructions in the package were a little cryptic, the website and documentation are helpful and I was able to get it installed and running with minimal problem.
First impression - it sounds good and it seems pretty powerful. Wordbuilder is a neat feature, but it takes some fine tuning to get realistic singing from it. I don't think anyone would find that to be a great surprise. I'm still climbing the learning curve.
I've had a few hiccups in Sonar, but not too bad. For some reason, the volume from the Choirs is very low. I just boost it with the trim, but it seems odd. I have also had couple of crashes, which seems to happen ocassionally with very big projects or when I have more than one project open at a time. (I don't usually do that, but sometimes when dealing with a big project I find it helps to create a smaller project with a subset of the instrumentation, work on that, and then consolidate the results. So, you have to have both open to copy.)
I also had a couple of cases in the Choir where the notes would end abruptly or be missing in a chord. 'still trying to figure that one out - maybe it's a resource issue. Anyway, overall I'd have to say I like it, so far so good.
Thank you all again!
Bapu - I didn't see your recommendation for Soundiron until after I placed the order. Looks pretty cool, but I'd probably have gone with this anyway because of the price and Wordbuilder - but thanks!