Of the new drawing tools (guides and vanishing points), textured vector brushes, and recolouring, only the first one will be available in the basic Essentials edition. The other two will require Harmony Advanced or Premium.
The new master controllers, new rigging tools, mattes and masks options, and node view improvements are reserved for the Premium edition. As is a new OpenGL node that improves the performance of (working with parts of) rigs.
Aside from these, this release seems mainly focused on removing Quicktime reliance in Windows (now Windows Media Foundation is used instead) and retina display support.
So... The essentials version is still pretty limited, and I see no market for that one at all. Why work with Essentials if OpenToonz is available for free for beginner animators? Advanced is missing out on any of the new rigging tools - which means no competition for Moho. Even the Premium edition still can't quite touch Moho's cutout character rigging tools.
But for existing premium users it is a reasonable upgrade. Some long overdue things (guides!).
Adobe is now said (according to beta testers) to up the ante finally again and is working on a number of animator-related feature updates. Toonboom is a pretty over-confident and their 'high-and-mighty' posture in the market might start working against them. Thing is, they advertize themselves as the best in the world, which they aren't - but nowadays it seems shouting falsehoods out the loudest makes them 'true' in the mind of many people.
I blame advertising.
