I'm not sure in what way your Eclipse experience was so atavistic, but I'd like to point out that at least for several years I was aware of, Eclipse had a significant competitive advantage:
Incremental compilation.
You could make a small change, do a Ctrl-S, and Eclipse would compile the change nearly instantly, where all competing products (that I was aware of, correct me if you know better) needed to fire up a Java compiler and feed it at least all changed source files. For me, this was difference of 2 seconds versus maybe 20-30.
And not only that, but but being able to debug and change code without restarting the debugger was something I was always envious of coming from the .NET side of things.
Java Hotspot has always been a huge productivity booster.
Incremental compilation is not tied to the compiler, since it has this ability when coding C/C++ applications too. I always disabled it since does not work properly with multi-project with custom libraries. Main project, it worked just fine.
>JDT Core is the Java infrastructure of the Java IDE. It includes:
>An incremental Java compiler. Implemented as an Eclipse builder, it is based on technology evolved from VisualAge for Java compiler. In particular, it allows to run and debug code which still contains unresolved errors...
>...The JDT Core infrastructure has no built-in JDK version dependencies, it also does not depend on any particular Java UI and can be run headless.
Not only that, but what does it matter if incremental compilation is "not tied to the compiler" if Eclipse was the only software that utilized it at the time?
> I believe Eclipse has it's own Java compiler, so it was probably a compiler feature.
It does, and it's much better than javac for IDE use cases. That's one of my biggest pain points with IntelliJ. They've tried to implement some kind of incremental compilation on top of javac, but it doesn't work reliably and often forced 5-minute from-scratch recompiles on the last project I worked on.
Incremental compilation.
You could make a small change, do a Ctrl-S, and Eclipse would compile the change nearly instantly, where all competing products (that I was aware of, correct me if you know better) needed to fire up a Java compiler and feed it at least all changed source files. For me, this was difference of 2 seconds versus maybe 20-30.