While I'm very thrifty and smart with my money, the difference in price between Chief Architect and SketchUp is not a concern. Simply because my time is valuable, and if I can finish my flat-rate projects faster, I will earn more money over a given time.

Can anyone with experience in SketchUp Pro and Chief Architect Premier share your opinions on which is superior for a professional architectural drafting/design/BIM service (mostly residential, but occasional commercial)?

Chief Architect seems really great, and SketchUp seems really great as well. I see some people using SketchUP to create house plans with 3D modeling, but it seems it is really not made for architecture specifically, whereas Chief Architect is. In SketchUP, it seems a lot of things are manual by placing "dumb" annotations in layout of sections, tags, and electrical symbols. I don't want to go backwards from Revit! I just want something mainly faster!

I have PlusSpec Pro for SketchUp and it has some nifty things for residential BIM, but is fairly new and in my opinion needs about 10 years to have everything I would need. It's an Australian company and their building methods differ slightly from here in the US. I like that SketchUP is great for free-form modeling, but I don't want to be left modeling everything from scratch, especially when the design changes!

As a last note, I'm a current Revit expert and am looking to move over to a more efficient software for modeling and documenting residential projects. Revit takes way too long for almost everything, costing me significant lost revenue.