I've been a MetaPost user for a couple of years. I've done things for friends or for my own pleasure (and sometimes for my own job). One may wonder how can pleasure come into play since it's about programming and, quite often, mathematics.
As you will see in the next pages, MetaPost allows to make basic stuff or funny things; but it also allows to draw very precise shapes, curves and designs. It's just like TeX (and MetaFont). Once you've made an accurate typesetting---clear, sober, truly readable--- you'll look at other documents with some will for criticism.
About quality, well, ... even some famous scientific publishers... (ok, I won't say that their typographical work is not sufficient). All about quality relies on the user. So, if you are very demanding, you could obtain very good results. (I hope that my samples will help you to believe that.)
About programming, well, ... it's always what frightens people. If you are afraid of that, just buy the MetaFontbook and you will see how it can be joyfull to practice MetaFont (MetaPost) language (they are almost the same). You can also search in Internet samples: get some MetaPost file, batch it, include it in a TeX/LaTeX document. Anyway, anybody must read the MetaPost manual. My very opinion is that this language is very natural, easy to handle, almost never tricky (when one wants to do tricky things, he always does it in tricky way).
About automatically generated pictures, well... sometimes they are fine (3D pictures), sometimes they're not (implicit functions, pedagogical samples, ...). If you're not satisfied by such pictures, look on Internet if someone has done such a task with MetaPost and compare, ... or do it yourself with MetaPost and show it to the rest of the World.
About drawing programs with graphical interface, well... don't tell me anything about that. I've seen so many drawings where circles were not of the same size even if they were supposed to be so, where paths or lines did not join other elements even if they were supposed to do so... if, once, you've spent a quarter of a hour or more trying to adjust graphically complicated curves to match each others, it should be worth for you to try MetaPost.
You love Postscript programming? ... really? ... I'm sure that there are many things you cannot achieve directly in Postscript, and that MetaPost will lead you to some unexpected dimensions...
Anthony Phan,