I am sort of new to cartography, but I have used Dundjinni and CC2 in the past. I am also familiar with Illustrator. I need to know what (in everyone's opinion) is a good program for "vectoring" an already existing map. Vectoring may not be the correct term but it fits. I am working in Maptools (online gaming table) and I need to re-create some of the maps I am using because of horrible pixelization. So I need to re-create the maps I have. This is what I have tried so far and my reasons for it not working for me:
Gimp: Good program, real steep learning curve, really ahrd to figure out compared to illustrator. I can't get the layers to work properly. Not nearly enough textures.
Maptool: Not good for vectoring. Can do some things really good, except draw freehand and basic shapes that I can manipulate later in my project. Will not let me arrange any of the vectors I do to put other things on top or so I can compare to the parent map.
Illustrator CS6: My favorite and easiest for me to manipulate. One big problem, almost no textures for what I need it for. And I can't seem to find any free textures online.
Inkscape: I've barely worked with this one and my experience leads me to believe this will not work for what I need.

Please note that I have about 6 gigs of stuff I can place on the map from textures to overlays to buildings to ink pens to woolly mammoths to beetles, etc... Unfortunately I can't import the textures into Illustrator and have them work correctly, most of the time they show up as a solid color slightly similar to the base color of the original texture. the textures I have are all in .png format.

I hope someone can help.

Bruce