On IDEs: I have the 'pleasure' of being one of those chaps who spends parts of his day job reworking massive Java projects. There is no way in hell I'm touching that without an editor that deeply understands Java.
Seriously, it's a language sufficiently verbose and inexpressive to effectively require an IDE. If you're just going to be generating 70% of your code from your IDE, why is it there in the first place?
Unless you're planning to stay at your current company forever, this is as good a time as any to try something new. Put some excitement into your life :).
It's the Java that would really drive me off the wall. Even in enterprise business applications (which aren't fun as is), Java is exceptionally annoying. But it is easy to hire for!
Unless I'm missing something, specialized non-VIM IDEs tend to be much better at auto completion (especially in C++), jump-to-definition, refactoring, etc. IDE users (who typically are ignorant to VIM) can use these features with extreme productivity. On the other hand, VIM users tend to be rather ignorant of how incredibly productive you can be and how nice it feels to have these powerful context-sensitive tools at your fingertips (and sorry, but CTAGS is useless). Regardless of what IDE you use, nobody can deny IMO that having an editor look up APIs and function lists for you in a context-relevant manner is productivity-boosting versus the alternate of scanning headers manually.
So in this sense I think both VIM/EMACS and IDE users are ignorant to other editor paradigms. What I don't like is how each party tries to claim that their method is the best, without having truly tried both.
I've used both extensively (used VIM for years) and I prefer IDEs by far, but that's just my personal preference.
I may be crazy about Emacs, but I'd probably still use an IDE if I had to do significant Java development. This says far less about IDEs and editors than it does about Java: I'm going to try very hard not to do any significant Java development in the future, thank you very much!
And that's really the entire point of my earlier post: it was not in favor of editors or IDEs, it was in favor of not using Java. Java is a poor language cursed with a good implementation: it's too good to die but not good enough to use.
A common argument I hear from people defending Java is that their IDE can generate half their code for them. And that was what I was really responding to: if you can use a tool to automatically generate all that code, it should just not be there in the first place!
Your experiences using an IDE for Java say as little about the relative merits of an IDE or text editor as experiences using Emacs on some Lisp: they're both extreme cases. And, more importantly, the reason normal editors are poor for Java, and the reason that SCdF is not touching a normal editor, are endemic to Java and not to the other tools.
You can also see it as a "problem" of the language if you cannot create an IDE that improve your productivity over a text editor.