Well-written review! As another option, I’d like to recommend Rainmaker’s Spell Catcher, which used to be distributed by Casady & Greene before they went out of business.

The original developer reclaimed the rights for it and has been developing and selling it ever since. Not only does it have TypeIt4Me’s abbreviation capabilities (unwieldily called “Shorthand Glossary expansions” here) - it also has a full-fledged, multilingual spell checker and thesaurus which works across all OS X applications, and also integrates with the built-in OS X spell checker / dictionary.

Spell Catcher also has powerful text manipulation features including actions like “Strip Whitespace”, “Quote” (for email-style quoting, including word wrapping), “Strip Characters”, “Form Paragraphs”, and many others.

I’ve been using it for just over a year now and it’s incredible. I have no connection whatsoever with the developer; just a very happy customer.