Ah, even the Bad One sounds like a young grasshopper. If y'all had ever worked with IPPS, which is what IRAF replaced in 1985, we wouldn't hear so much grousing. The I stood for interactive - as in every command and parameter had to be entered when prompted, no scripting. Ran in one room with three graphics terminals and a single image display, located directly below the CDC 7600 machine so they could put a custom "high-speed" link. Didn't like the order of steps the programmer had imposed on reduction? Tough.

Still, it had one very cool feature - the IIS image display had three image planes which could be mapped to RGB, and each plane had actual physical knobs you could turn to change the brightness and contrast on the fly. Getting decent 3-color composites for me still hasn't gotten quite as fast.

And one thing I still haven't seen competition for IRAF in is in reduction of two-dimensional spectra, long slit or multi-object. Now once it's extracted to one dimension or rectified to pure wavelength/position/intensity, I often bolt to IDL as fast as the next grumpy astronomer... And for a lot of routine imaging tasks, I've stared using Axiom Research's (i.e. Mike Newberry's) Mira package running on my laptop (the one I bought with proceeds from playing trombone in a ballroom dance band - does that jeopardize my professional status?). Image alignment, combination, and aperture photometry are a lot more convenient than in other things I've tried. Well, except that I seem to have an uncanny ability to find data sets which uncover hitherto invisible bugs, but Mike has been stunningly fast in finding the problem and updating the software.

Mind you, I need IRAF, STSDAS, IDL, and (gasp) FORTRAN on a pretty much daily basis... and spend a fair amount of time trying to help grad students and summer research folks over the vertical part of the learning curve. If anybody needs it, I can make a PDF of my instructions for reducing a 2D galaxy spectrum in IRAF (great, now he tells us!).