It's probably been about a decade since I messed with Wings, but I seem to recall having liked it. I do like Wilcom more. Wilcom also makes it easier to handle (within reason) pictures that aren't perfectly straight, dealing with curvatures in the picture comes with doing a lot of them though. One downside with replicated pictures of embroidery stitch outs (even if it's flat and straight on) is that any imperfections of the stitch out process it self (push/pull especially) has to be deal with as well and that's a real booger.
I firmly believe in doing it the manual or semi-manual way (if either or both are supported in the software that one has) as more likely that's transferable to other programs, so if one has to switch (for whatever reason) that switch is not as painful if one isn't too beholding to the more vendor specific abilities. Due to that, a lot more programs are open to one, so don't have to go with the most expensive. Whenever I would be teaching people, I would have them use Thred. Things like that help make an open source Inkscape extension more viable compared to the equivalent $3k plugin for Ai/Draw.
When I started all this, the user was actually the stitch engine, one mouse click was one needle insertion. So an approx. 7k stitch count design took 7k mouse clicks.