As for doing anything in any program (mentioned by another poster), yes that's true... For that matter, use pen and ink, airbrush, or whatever...
The reason some of us prefer coreldraw, as Artbot so elegantly stated in his analogy, is because it's efficient for illustration and design. If I can produce a rendering in half the clicks and time as it would take in Illustrator, then I am going to do that. So I do.
In 2000 I was using corel 9 scripts to automate color separating CMYK files for a license plate manufacturer (their printing system required 4 separate line art .bmp files). CLient had 4 Series of license plates. Each series contained 25 design files. Each file had 52 customizations in it (using layers for each customization). 4 series x 25 files, x 52 customizations = 5,300 files. Those 5,300 combinations then had to be exported, split into C, M, Y & K files, each having to be line screened/halftoned (resulting in a total 20,800 files total). They were looking to hire temps to do the mind numbing export and splitting/linescreening of each combination, figuring 2-3 workers for 6 months.
It took a week to script, but managed to make it work. Once complete, a click, and all files were exported and halftoned in under 10 hours. Sure beats 6 months salary for 2-3 employees.
Later when they took their business to the web, creating the web images (both thumbnails and larger product images) was a breeze using the same scripting methods.
Illustrator and photoshop didn't have scripting available then... But yes, it could have been done with those programs. I saved them alot of money, damn near made his business possible/profitable, and made some nice cash in the process.
Later I began using transparency effects to shade my renderings, resulting in more efficient re-use of my templates. Illustrator wouldn't come out with transparency until later, and even then, using gradients in the transparencies was a multiple step process (like many other methods in it's archaic GUI) compared to a click and drag in corel.
For our work, we can work in actual size, or at worst, apply a scale to our art. Try to explain to an illy user how to scale 1/3 size at 100ppi for a 53' hauler... If you're lucky, one actually has a brain and can scale it to 10% for 'easy math' in the head.
I always liked illustrators flexibility in managing colors... Until I tried to print a pantone color chart (created in corel in about 2 minutes using a script) directly out of illustrator cs2, only to find theres a limit to like 17 spot colors in one file... So I guess just change the layout to use less color, because the software should be the limitation on the design process... not.
And that's why I use corel. Because I rarely find myself in a situation where corel isn't cutting it for my design needs. Whereas with illy, I find I have to jump through hoops for it to accomodate my needs.
But if all one is doing, is hitting FILE, OPEN, followed by FILE, PRINT, then it really doesn't matter whether corel is more efficient or not.
