Lee,

FireWorks can do some great things Adobe can't do easily if at all, like adding shadows and glows and also fading images - which can be indespensible. You can come up with some of the same effects in Adobe but it takes much longer where they are already preprogrammed into FireWorks. Image ready, with it;s slicing and abilt to perform batch functions are two of the things that make it great and they are also my choice for optimization and making animated gifs.

Being so used to Adobe for so long, there was a bit of a learning curve at first but I find I use both programs now on a daily basis