I just spent the last hour trying to help someone over instant messenger perform some GIS analysis using ArcView. Lets just say the hoops you have to jump through to get ArcView to accomplish tasks that are actually simple in ArcInfo is aggravating. I know many people have ArcView and try and use some 3rd party tools to do but lets get this out on the table; ArcView is a viewer, ArcEditor is for editing Geodatabases and ArcInfo is for GIS analysis. I don’t think ESRI has been as vocal enough with their users, telling them not to use ArcView as an analysis tool, as they should be. As the new Geoprocessing tools take off in 9.2, you are really shortchanging yourself by not upgrading to ArcInfo if at all possible. Actually lets be honest here, with the new Cartography tools at 9.2 you’ll want to have an ArcEditor license anyway to create these new cartographic features, otherwise you are just going to be on the outside looking in.
At a minimum any serious GIS Analyst using ESRI software needs a copy of ArcEditor to do their job. Yes you can hack your way though a job just using an ArcView, but if you work in an ESRI shop and stuck on ArcView, I’d be spending this summer working on figuring out how to upgrade my copy of ArcView to at least ArcEditor to be ready for when ArcGIS 9.2 arrives.