Expression Engine

[amber]

Have any of y'all (yes, I'm Southern :) ) used Expression Engine (http://www.pmachine.com/) as a CMS before? It seems to be exactly what I'm looking for, but I'm always a little wary of putting money towards something I'm not terribly familiar with. Basically, I'd love to set something up like what hicksdesign (http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/) has with Movable Type, but I've got a personal blog using MT, and I get frustrated with it a lot when I'm doing non-standard things. I've played around with Wordpress before, and it's very frustrating to go searching for all of the plugins that I'd need to get something anywhere similar to what hicksdesign has.

Any ideas? Or is there another CMS platform out there that y'all would recommend?

Amber