Fireworks v. Illustrator

in pictures.
Last night using Fireworks and a picture of myself sitting:
Tuesday night using Illustrator:

I did try to use illustrator again last night, but after spending a long time trying to just extract myself from the background and make a half-decent mesh, I decided to switch over to Fireworks – which I need to upgrade, because CS3 in OSX Lion is sort of weird. Also, I dropped my laptop last night and the keys are sticky – but that’s besides the point.
What do the pictures mean:
Probably that I should stick with Fireworks for my graphic-making experiments because as much as I hate to say it, I’m more familiar with it and illustrator just isn’t as intuitive to me. Because of that, I really want to learn illustrator because I feel like it’s lame to only stick with something because I’m familiar with it. But it’s not just that – I’ve spent hours and hours over the last few days trying to learn my way around illustrator, and I managed to make something that looks sort of decent in it, but I don’t have the patience to sit there and tap every single point on a mesh with my track pad (UGH!) maybe if I had a mouse or was sitting at a desk with my wacom tablet it’d be easier.
Fireworks, I’ve used for years, and I was able to pick it up very quickly. It’s more intuitive for me, and now even after not playing with it for ages, picking it back up again I’ve been able to make better images than I did when I was using it all the time. I think getting back into painting has really helped me with creating digital images. Understanding things about light and shadows and shades is apparently something universally applicable.
For now, the Pen tool + Gradients seem to be winning over the Pen tool +Mesh.