Mark, I've come 180 from the position I had, which is yours now. The product has been substantially improved in the past 2 yrs, fixing many of its annoying limitations. Ireland considers itself as 'publisher', with Sage NA as merely its distributor. It has 15k customer orgs and growing 15%-20% annually, above the market. Ireland is marketing directly in NA, and it's not bad stuff.
Most important, Ireland is actively marketing Sage CRM as stand alone, rather than merely an appendage to ERP.