It's been a long time since i've used CCE but yes it does produce very good output indeed. One of the reasons i moved to HC was because of added support for multiple cores, which CCE doesn't have, and as far as i'm aware there is no proposed support for multiple cores.
As to the dark scenes, i don't find the macroblocking too bad, and 'fraid i'm not one for messing with matrices or settings, but i'll make a mental note to running a comparison when i get hold of the final part of Battlestar Galactica, plenty of dark scenes guaranteed there.
yes, as far as I know, there is no multi core support.
I have a dual core pentium D 2.8 GHz processor with 3 gigs of ram on my pc. It's almost 5 years old now, and with the 2 gigs of DDR2 memory I added this Christmas, it drastically increased my processing and encoding speeds (I guess it can handle a larger workload now). A typical 3 VBR pass through CCE takes just over 2 hours long, 5 VBR passes takes approximately 160-200 minutes depending on the compression ratio.
Not too long compared to others that I have read where it takes up to 400-500 minutes. Doesnt really bother me too much as I can go watch a movie, come back, and the encoding process will be complete. Procoder 3 took about 200 minutes to encode king kong with two VBR passes, not too bad, but it is incredibly slower than CCE.HC finished its 2 VBR pass just over 150 minutes, still not too shabby.
