I also enjoy gifs. I have been creating gifs with VirtualDub so far.

I usually prefer writing scripts to do stuff but VirtualDub is one of the few tools I simply use because I enjoy the open source and hacker spirit behind it.

An interesting plugin I miss for VD is an color reduction algorithm which would help to create very small gifs.

On reddit and tumblr gifs are a growing trend and it might be worth to put some effort into gif creation.