Embroidery I2 Plug-in For Adobe Illustrator

I am starting a new thread in hopes of attracting an answer specific to the Embroidery i2 plug-in for Adobe Illustrator.
I am an experienced AI user but am just a fledgling at learning to digitize for embroidery. I prefer to use a mac and the i2 plug-in appears on the surface to be the ticket for those of us in my situation. HOWEVER there is no good way to demo the program without dropping a minimum of $200 on their 1 month demo. I am not skilled at digitizing enough to feel comfortable throwing away 200 clams just to test drive the program. I'm afraid that with my lack of skills and knowledge in digitizing I will not know enough at this point to recognize key missing elements that I would want to have in a program. I am hoping that someone who is a skilled digitizer who uses Wilcom or perhaps a similar well known mainstay program AND who is also versed in Adobe Illustrator well enough to not be hampered by it's well documented steep learning curve that has evaluated the i2 plug-in. I am finding this to be a tall order as no review I have read seems to meet this criteria. I plan to spend the next several years learning to digitize and I would prefer to do it on my mac and with a program that in the end will have ALL the same capabilities of the venerated Wilcom program. I don't want something that is just a bunch of automated tools and not fully capable of all the things you pro's do with the dedicated programs. Conversely it would be foolish for someone unfamiliar with AI to attempt to review this plug-in due to the extreme nature of learning AI (often taking years of itself to master) as they would just be frustrated out of their minds with the AI methods of operation. The vectorization and line drawing capabilities of AI would make child's play of most of that part of the process for a guy like me who does that all the time in AI.
In short I don't really want to have to learn a complete new program that would also require me to purchase and maintain another computer if I can avoid it. Think of it in this way, You want the newest hottest program on the market that is purported to be the do-all end-all you could ever own (this is Wilcom) however it only runs on a Linux based format so you will be having to set up and learn Linux in order to use it. That is about the best comparison that I can come up with of where I sit. I hate Windows. I have a laptop with windows 7 although it is suspect and runs slow and I rarely use it for anything important. I absolutely don't want to have to spend many hours over many years plucking away on that thing or one similar when I have my beautiful mac sitting there. I am pretty disappointed with the Pulse family of products that has no cost free trial available and can completely see why there are not very many users out there. $200 is nearly 6% of the total $3500 purchase price. That's like having to spend $1500 to test drive a car. Even though you could apply 100% of that money to the final purchase if you decided you liked the car would you take the drive? I wouldn't, then throw in the added curve ball that you are new to driving and not sure what kind of car you really want to end up with once you perfect your driving skill and say that whatever car you buy you may be stuck driving the rest of your life. Silly marketing campaign IMO. I would love it if they had a non working demo where you could design all you wanted but couldn't export a working file. That would make more sense and let you spend a little time on the test drive without any risk of hard earned money.
So if anyone who fits the narrow confines of this query happen along I would LOVE to hear from you. I have posted this on another forum as well and am hoping for the right person to chime it. At the end of the day can this i2 program do all the things you would be able to do with Wilcom or similar? That is the question. I will eventually take the $200 test drive but not until I feel I know what I need to know and I hate having to fumble around with a totally new program over on my windows laptop in the meantime. (currently own IDS, and I thin it is lacking as well as frustrating in the vector design department)
Paul