Hey, DRG, you're just the guy I've been looking for. I'm currently testing PSE 7.0 and Lightroom 2.2. (Have used PSE 2.0 for years.) Maybe it is because I'm unfamilar with Lightroom, but I find PSE much easier to use for cropping, resizing and most other things.
But I took some underexposed JPEG images into LR and was amazed at how easy it was to change exposure--and how great the images looked. It seems to me that the auto commands (loved the "autotone") in LR do a better job than those in PSE. But I couldn't find a "save as" command in LR, and the thing I liked least about it is the small size of the imported images. I really couldn't tell what a great job LR did until I put them back into My Pictures and veiwed them full screen. PSE has a much bigger image to work with.
I'll continue to play around with LR for the next 30 days or so and try to figure more out about it.
I often thought about calibrating my monitor, but I'm not shooting for National Geo, and all of my present markets are more than happy with my work (mostly smaller magazines and newspapers), so I've put it off. I'll check out the ones you listed. Thanks.
Everything I send out is camera ready, although one photo editor told me he coverts all JPEG images scheduled for publication into TIFF images and then processes them himself.