It's been a LONG time since I've played with Ecto. I used the previous incarnation (KungLog) before it changed to become Ecto, and lost touch with it since then. I've been using the browser-based WordPress posting interface almost exclusively, with occasional dabbles into the worlds of Firefox+Performancing and Flock.
Gotta say, I'm less impressed with Ecto's write-and-preview flow (and by default, it's not even a live preview, and the "automatic" preview isn't quite "live"). If an app is going to provide an interface like this, it really should go the extra mile and use a full-out WYSIWYG interface (with the option to revert to source editing mode). And the controls for entering/editing hyperlinks are, well, bizarre and non-intuitive. A mini-toolbar at the bottom of the editing window is pretty un-Maclike, and odd when considering all other controls are in an almost-conventional toolbar above the editing pane...
I do like the management features, but they're not radically different/better than Performancing's offering. Actually, what would really rock would be a version of Performancing for Safari. I know it's probably just a XUL app, so this could be a non-trivial task, but most Mac users are using Safari, and it would be nice to have this stuff brought to it...
Oh, and Performancing should sort Categories. Ecto does this (well, any sane app should) and it really helps if you have, say 285 categories...
When all's said and done, I don't see myself ponying up for an Ecto license. It's a cool app, but other apps are coming along and nicely eating its breakfast.
Update: Ecto published this post after the < ! --more--> block, which tells WordPress to show the post content only on the single post display page. The text entry fields weren't labeled, so I thought I was doing it the other way around... It also threw an error dialog up saying the post couldn't be published, when it was published just fine. This is app is supposed to increase blog posting productivity hownow?