Unless someone else is willing to help you, then you should upgrade to the Professional version if your intention is to produce Commercial fonts.
I don’t know what your long-term needs are, but look at the Feature List and decide whether FontCreator meets your needs, or whether you really need FontLab.
The Optical Metrics feature seems to work well, though it is too early to say whether it is perfect or not. I haven’t finished my first set of body fonts yet. Erwin has already improved it since the program’s release in April to include a choice between Tabular and Proportional figures.
You can see the results of Optical Metrics on different fonts with different settings in this thread.