Just saw that Nisus has announced a Pro version. If all new features that are announced do indeed work as they should, this product could be of interest to many. See nisus.com/pro .
As far as I can tell from a quick glance, still no outlining.
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Outlining is essential indeed: it’s the main reason why I’m still working with Mellel, which in many other respects is about to make me lose my patience. Strange Nisus’ developers don’t seem to realize how fundamental outlining is for many.
And then: it remains to be seen how exactly all these attractive features have been implemented. There are many different ways of implementing indexing, cross referencing and so on: some are priceless, others almost useless.
But I’m really curious.
Personally I’ve never felt at home in Nisus. I’m still hoping that Pages 3 lives up to the rumors about it being more word-processing oriented than the layout emphasis of Pages 2; also, 2 is extremely slow in handling large docs. In many ways, a beautiful piece of software, though. I think it’s being released today. 
My dilemma as well. I can’t do without outlining any longer, now that I’ve had it, but Mellel so un-user-friendly in so many other ways, clunky is the technical term, I think! I find myself frustrated with it and wishing for an alternative. But as long as it is the only app with really sophisticated outlining capabilities, I’m stuck with it!
I own both Nisus and Mellel, and I have to agree with your sentiments here. I was also under the impression that NWE was going to build its feature set, and that the “Express” was only there as a reminder that it had not yet got to the old NW standard as opposed to being an implication that there would be a “Pro” version. I am a little miffed about this, although the Nisus guys are very nice and helpful people whose developers have pointed me in the right direction more than once, so I won’t complain too much.
Best,
Keith
But it can’t be denied that this new version, whatever it may be called, adds a whole range of very significant features to the existing one; so an upgrade fee might not seem wholly unreasonable.
On the other side, I don’t see the need of two different versions of this application. I think they’d better ship this new version simply as Nisus 3.0, asking a modest upgrade fee to those who already own the present version.
I also got Mellel for its outlining, and mostly abandoned it because of its clunkiness (or, from another POV, my inability to grok its way of doing things). I’d love to see Scrivener adopt the kind of outlining Mellel does, but actually, I just outlined two fairly long features using SCrivener and it worked pretty well. Part of it is just realizing that a doc and a folder and an outline point are really just three ways of describing the same thing; the computer doesn’t really care what you call them. Once I made that mental shift in metaphor, I added a section called “Outline” to my Binder (between Draft and Research), and outlined there, making my story a collection of outline points that could be fused in Edit SCrivenings. Maybe not quite as elegant as Mellel, but definitely good enough for my needs.