Thanks for the perspective, Amber. This is the first Macheist I’ve participated in and I am hoping to get The Hit List… and I was getting nervous that it might not make it. It will be interesting to see what happens.
I prefer Espresso over Coda, but a lot of people seem to like Coda better.
I like Espresso because the jump from Smultron was easy. Plus, Espresso feels more at home and easier to understand and use for me. Coda does have a lot more features and support, but Coda is older (The first official release of Espresso was on the 23rd of March).
So it depends on your workflow and what you want for your work environment (and how much you want to pay).
I participated in MacHeist both last year and this year. I’m really pleased that this year they’re offering more full-versions as opposed to all the ‘special MacHeist’ versions and ‘just out of Beta’ stuff from last year. Wallet by Acrylic Software was nice but too buggy and was a non-upgradeable special version. Acrylic’s new offering this year was Times which is a newsreader and fantastic one at that! Now if only Acrylic accepted credit cards instead of using PayPunk. I won’t be able to upgrade to version 2 since my bank doesn’t allow payments through third-party services. 
I don’t care about the ‘who’s its’ and ‘what’s its’ behind MacHeist. I’m just happy to get so many free and discount apps from being a member. Sure, not everything is going turn out to be useful and some of the developers may go under, but even if you only use 2-3 apps out of each bundle, it’s still a hell of a deal! Just my two bits…