After spending a few days playing around with Magento Commerce, I really like it.  It was much more difficult to figure out how to create a theme than with just about any other cart I have used.  However, with this complexity comes flexibility.  You can easily do things in this cart and keep your upgradeability that are not possible in just about any other cart out there.

Thats really what I am looking for:  A cart that has the features I need without having to “hack” them in and lose the ability to easily upgrade the cart.  This cart seems to provide those thus far.

I spent a few hours completely screwing up the template and learning how to do it.  After re-installing the default template, I was able to get the basic design wrapped around the site in a few hours.

So far, so good with this new cart.