I use the two side by side. At times I've found Designer's SVG support actually worked better than Illustrator. Illustrator is definitely faster but there are quite a number of useful pixel/recolouring features in Designer. Generally though the maturity and advanced features (mesh, isolate edit, Pathfinder!) eclipse what Designer brings to the table.
I was a long time Fireworks holdout, and Designer is maybe the closest in feel compared to Sketch or Illustrator (and they're copying each other better now).
All said, the bang for buck is great though, and UI is way easier than Inkscape I gotta say ;)
I'd also be keen to see one if these unreleased tools. My own experience getting into investing out of uni right at the start of the GFC taught me a hell of a lot about these straight line "predictions".
Do any other providers offer CSS inlining? This has been a great Mandrill feature. I have a number of domains all sending only few 100 emails/month, but the formatting is important. The cost jump to MailChimp monthly + Mandrill is tremendous.
I'm still in the startup phase, and the time saving of Heroku has been fantastic. I'm ever mindful of these types of stories and the scaling cost though.
I've not seen it mentioned so far: RedHat has OpenShift (https://www.openshift.com/) out now, v3 will see Docker support too. With only a quick play, it seems to be a mix of Heroku and dedicated host.
On sysadmins: talking to a guy who managed AWS nodes for a popular iOS game you've probably played, he made the comment that it was great to have a new team member onboard now, dedicated to looking after all the VMs. I figure he's rediscovered sysadmins, just using different kit.
The risk I see with managing your own Dokku, etc is handling issues/maintaining uptime if it's not your only job/skill. When another HeartBleed comes along, can you react quickly and competently enough?
I was a long time Fireworks holdout, and Designer is maybe the closest in feel compared to Sketch or Illustrator (and they're copying each other better now).
All said, the bang for buck is great though, and UI is way easier than Inkscape I gotta say ;)