As for alternatives, there's a number of vector-based drawing programs out there. But none of them totally replace all the functions found in Adobe Illustrator. That especially goes for integration with other applications, such as Photoshop. Freehand was the closest alternative; it was the only other drawing app that could paste AICB vector paths into Photoshop. Freehand is a dead program. CorelDRAW is still fairly popular, but it only runs on Windows. Open source alternatives like Inkscape are better than nothing, but they lack many features and just feel clunky. It's like going back to the 1990's.