Great write up Jeff, although this only covers the text-editing feature of Lasso, and doesn't go into the drag and drop capabilities, or real-time Aesop Story Engine component editing.

I’d like to add that adding media components is done with Aesop Story Engine. With this free plugin activated, it gives you 13 media components that are fully drag and drop within the article. Without Aesop Story Engine, Lasso is a front-end text editor.

Developers can also filter the restriction level and use it anywhere. By default, it’s limited to single posts, pages, and custom post types, but can be extended to custom fields as well.

Despite the theme conflicts that you came across, we’re pretty confident it’s stable. We’re launching as a beta (if you remember, Velocity Page took the same approach) so that we can better understand what our users want. Hence, many requests for adding categories. We viewed this as a content management task (not an editing task), however we’re quickly finding out that users want this. And we’ll iterate accordingly.

But if everyone waits until 1.0, as you recommend, iterations will be slow to come.