Some of it is nostalgia. Some things it genuinely did better -- CodeWarrior's inline ASM syntax kicked the shit out of the GCC equivalent we're stuck with today.

And some of it is highly subjective: there was a simplicity to the old CodeWarrior UI in pre-OS X MacOS. You had a separate project window and a text editor window for every file you were editing. It was clean. It was uncluttered. It wasn't 300 tabs, sidebars, and top bars jammed into one God Window to Rule Them All.

It kept out of your way and did its job quietly.

I wrote a lot of code with CodeWarrior. One of the things I miss most is the PowerPlant framework. Such a nice "forest" design with mix-ins. (Yes, you can download it, but it isn't the same). I learned a lot about designing usable class libraries by reading PowerPlant.

I learned a lot about designing usable class libraries by reading Microsoft Foundation Class libraries, too, but in the sense of "whatever you do, don't design !@#$% like this..."