At work we recently purchased Extensis Portfolio 7 to manage our 80,000 images (give or take). We are currently investigating other "enterprise-class" options as well, but my department needed a solution now, so we ended up getting Portfolio.
I've spent a large part of the day setting up Portfolio. Again and again, I find myself saying "This isn't as good as MC" or "That's kind of like MC, but MC does it better" or "You've got to be kidding, you can't do that!?! MC can!"
Of course, you might be saying, "Well just use MC then why don't you" but alas, I can't use it on OSX so I can't use it in my department. It just makes me laugh though that we paid $110 (and that's with an Academic license, it's usually $199.95) for something that pales in comparison to a $45 program (that I got for $10 for the upgrade).
There are a few things in Portfolio that aren't available in MC (true client/server support being the big one and OSX-support being the reason we're not using it), but not much. And MC is gaining on them.
Anyway, has anyone else run into a problem in a corporate environment that MC would be beautiful for, but that (for some dumb reason) you can't use it? Or maybe you can, any success stories? Have you been forced to use a less-capable program and felt infuriated by the restrictions and lack-of-power?