Whether or not Corel is a good program is irrelevant here, it is a good program and knowing how to use it is definitely beneficial. Regardless of why Adobe is the industry standard program, it is what it is and it's much more beneficial to have an in-depth understanding of at least the basics of it's major components, Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. And Rooster and Bigdawg are right, Corel and Adobe color management only intermingle so well together, but that's going to be true when going from one software program to another, which is why Adobe shines, while all of the programs are independent, they operate as one so there's less chance of funky color issues popping up. So if a customer is giving you an .eps from Illustrator or a .psd from Photoshop, sure you can open it in Corel, but you're chances for headaches are greatly reduced by opening it in it's native program. Believe it or not, Adobe is the industry standard for a reason, and it's not because it's heavily promoted or taught in design school.
And yeah, the original Indesign sucked pretty bad. It was like a cheap knockoff of Quark. I stuck with Quark for a long time and have only really started to get into Indd since CS3. It's a killer program now, much better than anything that came before it. It's worth learning even if you don't use it often.
The first version of InDesign SUCKED bigtime and I never got around to changing the mags over to it...
