Decided to try printing the Astel that i made earlier this year. With fresh eyes the wings didn't look too good so i gave it a new pair (or two).
A neat thing you can apparently do in zbrush is turn alphas into flat meshes. Drawing the pattern in gimp was a lot easier than trying to sculpt it in directly.
Having real booleans made keying a lot easier. You can basically get the same effect in zcore but it takes a dozen obscure steps & has weird limitations that the software refuses to communicate. This feels very descriptive of the whole experience with core -- most things are possible but just super inconvenient. This is of course intentional, but most of the time it feels like they've just removed buttons from the UI leaving the functionality still available through some bizarre trick you find on the forums.