I am still only halfway through the process or so, so I haven't really tested out the formatting of the bibliography, which IME is where it often goes wrong (and where EndNote is difficult to beat in terms of consistency).
I could not agree more....endnote's cite-while-you-write functionality is certainly tops. Unfortunately every other aspect of the program is pretty dated! For me, Ipad itegration is more important...papers magic manuscripts is up to the task for the most part.
At the end of the day, I could always use Papers for cite while you write and Sente for pdf management - it's easy to export a full library of references (minus the pdfs) between the two apps, and with Papers I would have cite while you write functionality on my windows work desktop (I have both versions of Papers already purchased).
I anticipate that you will run into substantial problems doing something like this. I have found that metadata does not import/export from papers, sente, and endnote without incident. Book chapters, for example, are handled quite differently in papers than it is in its counterparts. Every time I have imported/exported, I have had to spend a fair bit of time tidying up a lot of the metadata pertaining to book chapters, websites, and reports that did not make the transition properly. I suspect that you'll find that this is not a very viable solution in the long term.
Do you sync across computers with dropbox?
I do...look, it works, although I must admit that it is definitely not without its flaws. I find myself 'holding my breath' every time that I turn on my computer at work and watch dropbox connect/download. When I got to work this friday Friday, for example, I realised that I had accidentally left my computer on at home (with papers running), and as a result could not use my library at work - very frustrating!!
And have you had any major formatting issues with Papers in terms of formatting references and bibliography in your texts?
None....yet. The papers CSL styles have been bang on. I do, however, anticipate that it won't all be sunshine and lollipops when I find myself needing a unique style that is not provided in the CSL repository.
Finally, could you expand a bit on the 'disaster' with Sente's cite while you write?
My 'disaster' (which ultimately drove me insane) related to the 'scan feature', whereby citations used multiple times throughout a document are showing up as multiple/duplicate entries in my bibliography.
For example, the single citation {Smith 2008} appeared in my bibiliography as:
Smith, A., 2008a..........
Smith, A., 2008b..........
Smith, A., 2008c..........
Smith, A., 2008d..........
This same issue cropped up in multiple documents, created using both word and scrivener - and drove me insane.
Also, I noted that sente started randomly inserting a "^" in front of many (but not all) of my references. No one was ever able to tell me what this meant, or how/if it was affecting my document.
Ultimately, my Sente experience was short-lived!