Comparison to iWeb and Proprietary Formats
Many people would say that this is the same kind of deal that iWeb is. iWeb is part of the Apple suite of tools that comes with every Mac. RW is similar but not nearly as restrictive. iWeb, to achieve it's total integration between its software elements (iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband and iTunes) to create all the hip and cool kinds of web media publishing - web pages, podcasts and online video and video. These publication options requires you to play by Apple's rules which of course leads you buying into the .mac service and keeps you stuck in using semi-proprietary formats for audio and video files. This makes for an ease of use that Apple is famous for but at the cost of not working in a variety of media formats. The bulk of the media is Quicktime based and unfortunately there's not a Linux/Unix Quicktime plugin. It's strange that despite Mac OSx being Unix based they still don't have a Quicktime plug-in for Unix or Linux. I digress but it's an important part of the iWeb's downfall. RW let's me create podcasts and use any kind media on my pages. There is a bit of favoritism towards Quicktime, but it's not the only option.
Publishing
RW lets me put my website anywhere either by FTP or .mac directly from the program with a "publish" tool. This works great with my GoDaddy.com hosting and my .mac account. For CTER stuff, I'm publishing on the students.ed.uiuc.edu server so I export my site and then copy it via a afp:// connection. This is due to the fact that most UIUC sites gave up supporting FTP for security reasons (understandably my shop did as well). Of course something like DW will do that as well and even better. One thing that DW does well is publish to a smb:// or mapped drive. The file/site management tool in DW is the best I've found out there but for my work away from the office RW and even iWeb is adequate.
Another area that DW excels at is site management, being able to view both the local copy and remote copy of the site files in side by side windows. This is excellent when compared versions of files. Updating individual files is a drag and drop. This can be accomplished by opening up two file management windows in Finder or the Windows desktop but it's quick and easy in DW.
Wrap-Up - What's Professional?
RapidWeaver is not Dreamweaver. It utilizes CSS based templates that give my content the flexibility to be repurposed and redesigned for different audiences with a single click. It is possible to create templates for RW and there are many designers that sell their own custom templates to expand the look and feel. I'm sure for a fee you could contract with one of these designers to do a CSS page system for your school. DW is a great tool for the web designer that needs to create something from scratch but when it comes to just adding text and images it's overkill. Certainly with a price tag of over $200 (UIUC site license price) it's hard to justify spending that for a "web typewriter" if that's all the development you do. RW can be deployed for $40 per desk and probably a site license could lower that.
On the other hand, if you are put in charge of creating original content and templates that others will be using, DW may be the right choice. You will have great flexibility in creating beautiful pages, Cascading Style Sheets for consistency in typographic options and an organizational structure that is second to none. Again the question remains, will you even come close to tapping what it has to offer. I've read on some of my classmates html editor reviews how they will put together better sites when they learn more about DW or other advanced editors. The program doesn't teach us to design or code, we need to learn html methods and then use something like DW or RW to achieve our vision. In the same thought we can't expect Microsoft Word to teach us to write, but it can facilitate the process.
What I'm ultimately considering is the definition of "professional" in web publishing (not web designing) - am I a professional designer creating sites or am I a professional in some other area of expertise that needs to publish on the web? (and looking professional while doing it.) My personal feeling is to the latter. I think the vast majority of us in CTER are also the latter. We are educators, not designers, but we need and desire to publish online.