In fact I enjoy working in it more than I do the much-vaunted Jetbrains IDEs, even when configured to use Xcode key shortcuts (thus short-circuiting the familiarity problem a bit). The faster autocomplete is nice, but a lot of the "smarter" parts end up getting in my way or doing the wrong thing more frequently than they are helpful. I can't really compare with Visual Studio since I've never really seriously developed for Microsoft platforms.
I will say though that Xcode got noticeably worse after Interface Builder got merged into it, and I think much of its woes stem from that merger even today. IB should've been left a separate tool, which is particularly evident now that XIBs and Storyboards are yielding to SwiftUI in the nearish future.
I really don’t want all the visual editors and previews. Interface builder, Core Data Model Editor, even Swift UI previews feel so half-baked that they’re effectively unusable anyway. Swift packages are a delight because they’re purely text based.
As coders, we’re working with text all day. It doesn’t make sense to context switch to dragging boxes around a canvas to wire things up.
I’d rather they invested the engineer time into the core editor and made it rock solid.
My hunch is that they spend so much time on them because they look great in demos, but when it comes to the end of the beta cycle and the tool is still broken, it leaves a bitter taste. Simplify it.
Note: I'm not connected in any way to Jetbrains, and I have not used AppCode myself, but I used other tools from them, and they're quite competent, I'd say.
It is an IDE + build system but you can totally write code in a different editor and compile it on the command line with xcodebuild.