So I bit the bullet and got one yesterday, thanks to the tip from everyone here. It was a very tedious build for me for some reason (maybe all the fiddly Technic bits?), but in the end the ship's grown on me by leaps and bounds. I definitely would've had buyer's remorse at full price, but I feel pretty good about it at $50: it's a solid ship (contrary to its wobbliness during the build itself) with some neat features, and it's nice to have a ship with some "room" in it that isn't capital-sized. It swooshes surprisingly well, too, considering how big and heavy it is.
The design of the actual ship (not the LEGO set) might've been trying to hard to be the "next Falcon", but design flaws aside I'm actually liking both the ship and the set itself very much. So much so that I saw the
Titanium version of it this morning and picked that up, too.

(There was a thread a while back about associating certain movies with set builds-- the Twilight for me will forever be linked to
Traitor, since I had it on last night during the build. Good movie.)
m19