"""For me, having reliable builds is FAR more important than the editor holding my hand with respect to Java syntax."""

I don't understand what "reliable builds" means in this context. I never had "unreliable builds" from Eclipse.

Also, what you call "holding your hand" actually is automating tedious manual labor re Java syntax, and continuous AST based syntax checking.

That --and build automation, is exactly what people want from an IDE. If you don't care for those, yeah, use anything else.

I find anything without actual AST-based syntax checking/autocomplete/navigation/refactoring as a dumb text editor, Emacs included.

Now, Eclipse has tons of problems, but that it got right.

It's sad that there is not a modern, GUI based, editor, with pluggable language support for multi-language use, using full AST power (regex highliting and ctags is so last century) while also being lean and mean...