Fed Up with Aperture

This is my last shot at getting Aperture 3 to work for me.

Despite the good efforts and advice of folks here in the Community, and conversations with Apple, I can't get the **** thing to work correctly with Photoshop. Or, I am not using it correctly. Either way, this should not happen:

Doing everything by the book, using Photo> Edit in Photoshop CS4 >Save (in PS), this is what I get back in Aperture. The icons say it's been externally edited, but no editing appears. Sometimes the PS file comes back as an "Unsupported File Format," sometimes it comes back but without the editing as in this example.

Maybe if I shot only in JPEG and edited only inside Aperture, everything would work; but I will continue using Photoshop for layer blending and compositing RAW images, and Aperture obviously cannot deal with that process.

If anyone can intuit what's going wrong, or what I might be doing wrong, I welcome any suggestions before I junk the whole project and go back my old workflow. The only suggestion I get from Apple support is that I need to upgrade to CS6, but spending another $500 to use Aperture is out of the question.

Right now am fed up with spending time and effort editing only to see that work simply disappear into some digital black hole. Thanks for reading and any suggestions,

Brian