I agree with the article. Vala is a wonderful language, but it doesn't have the necessary tooling built around it.
Sure but they had like 10 years to do that, I remember a french guy who ever wrote a complete IDE with autocompletition + package manager for Vala on Windows. Support from the Gnome Foundation ? zip .
Oh, and I even found the link.
http://www.tarnyko.net/en/?q=node/24
So the tooling my ass, they just don't want to bother with Vala
Also, GObject itself made a lot of sense in an era when C was dominant. Maybe now, not so much.