To me Eclipse used to be the gold standard for Java (it wouldn't even have occurred to me to use it for other languages, which usually had their own IDEs anyway. This was before Scala).
I didn't remember the exact version that jumped the shark, but TFA mentions Eclipse 4, so I googled and it must have been Juno (about 2012, then). It truly was night and day: the previous version of Eclipse was fast and responsive, and everything more or less worked, and then we got Juno which was completely unresponsive, took ages to do anything, it randomly froze or slowed down, and all sorts of widgets constantly failed to render or displayed error messages. Simply killing Eclipse because marketplace or some index update took too long became the norm. I remember thinking "but this is a SOLVED problem! All of this used to work! How can this be happening?", then reading the forums and finding out about the complete UI redesign and that they didn't have the budget to test it thoroughly. I'm not talking as a plugin writer but as an end user. It truly was a horror story.
The Scala IDE thing is more understandable because it was something new and Scala is a complex language. Still, it was embarrassing that this was the official IDE and it was so bad. IntelliJ was initially also very bad at Scala -- I remember it constantly gave compilation errors for perfectly good code -- but then it got improved to the point of usability, while Scala IDE remained slow and unusable. At that point I switched.
I didn't remember the exact version that jumped the shark, but TFA mentions Eclipse 4, so I googled and it must have been Juno (about 2012, then). It truly was night and day: the previous version of Eclipse was fast and responsive, and everything more or less worked, and then we got Juno which was completely unresponsive, took ages to do anything, it randomly froze or slowed down, and all sorts of widgets constantly failed to render or displayed error messages. Simply killing Eclipse because marketplace or some index update took too long became the norm. I remember thinking "but this is a SOLVED problem! All of this used to work! How can this be happening?", then reading the forums and finding out about the complete UI redesign and that they didn't have the budget to test it thoroughly. I'm not talking as a plugin writer but as an end user. It truly was a horror story.
The Scala IDE thing is more understandable because it was something new and Scala is a complex language. Still, it was embarrassing that this was the official IDE and it was so bad. IntelliJ was initially also very bad at Scala -- I remember it constantly gave compilation errors for perfectly good code -- but then it got improved to the point of usability, while Scala IDE remained slow and unusable. At that point I switched.