I used AutoCAD Electrical for six years, and honestly, now that I'm back on regular AutoCAD, I see very little advantage to it, especially if you have a block library already built up. If your company has any kind of standard that deviates from what Autodesk has decided everyone should use, you will spend a LOT of time setting up the new system. The main difference between ACADe and E-Plan is that ACADe is AutoCAD with a bunch of hack-and-slash lisp routines on top of it, and E-Plan was built from the ground-up as an electrical schematic drawing package.
I've never used E-Plan, but ACADe is a very "you will do things OUR way" kind of program. Let's say you want to add a symbol for a new component. You can do it, but it's very tedious and time consuming. Plus, if you want, say, a central schematic and component database and screen menu so all of your users are referencing the same parts, you have to hack a number of files to get it to work. Plus (and this is my BIG gripe), Autodesk is using Microsoft Access as it's database structure. Talk about SLOW. Wire references are also unidirectional, which sucks when you want to use PLC addresses for wire numbers and have to reference "backwards" to previous sheets or else it won't work. As time has gone on, each successive release of AutoCad Electrical has become more bloated, more buggy, and slower. It seems like every feature they add breaks 2 or 3. The upgrade from 2012 to 2013 cost me three days of downtime. Finally, it's really easy to break the links for component and wire cross referencing. All you have to do is not do things exactly right and suddenly you'll have wire numbers that won't go over to the next sheet, or you'll have wire number carrying over through a device even though the device is clearly breaking the network and should generate a new number, and component cross references that won't update. The bottom line is that AutoCAD Electrical does not adjust to your drawing standard. You are the one who must adjust your drawing standard to fit what AutoCAD Electrical has decreed acceptable.
All that time I was supposed to save by not having to check my drawings for cross referencing errors was devoured by all that time I had to spend checking my drawings to make sure the automatic cross referencing worked. In the end, AutoCAD electrical offered little to no real advantage to me. Most of the time I just copy the previous drawing set and change what I need, anyway, so schematics really don't eat up much of my time to begin with. You'll spend way more time trying to force ACADe to do what you want it to do than you will just drawing with you want with LT.
