Wow. Lots of people here don't like MS Paint *tugs at her shirt collar* lol
Well, I gave it a 9. Why? I like it alot. I can do pixel art with it. lol
That and it's the only program I've ever used for pixel art. So I'm totally in the dark about all these other programs you guys are talking about.
I use Photoshop to make things transparent, and I also use it to save my pixel work as GIFs without losing any color (which MS Paint does for some reason).
As for making animated sprites, I use a little handy program called UnFREEz. It's very basic, but it does the job.
One feature I'd like MS Paint to have is a "layer" feature where I can open a hand-drawn pic, and pixel over it without actually effecting the pic. ...If ya all know what I mean. lol