I read feature lists of editors like this and wonder why people just don't use a good IDE like IntelliJ. It does everything in this list and a lot more with minimal configuration.
2. IntelliJ costs more.
3. IntelliJ is simply better for Java than ST2 (more significant time-saving professional features), but not necessarily so for other languages (it becomes less clear cut with languages like ruby).
4. ST2 replaces your standard text editor, IntelliJ doesn't.
For a trivial example, if you can't remember the name of some function you wrote in another module, it may be the case that the function was poorly named or the code you are currently writing is trying to do too many things. In an full-blown IDE, it doesn't feel wrong; in a simple text editor, it actually hurts. (Yes, ST2 has autocomplete, but IIRC, it's based on a tokenizer, not a parser. In either case, I operate with it disabled.)
IMHO, it's a trade-off. It requires marginally more mental effort to compose code without the features of a full-blown IDE. This marginal increase in effort may slow me down considerably in the beginning to middle parts of a project compared to someone using a full-blown IDE; however, by the time I "catch up," my code will probably be more conducive to safe expansion and maintenance, and for all but trivial projects, that's the majority of development time.
A bit like a sketcher could draw a few lines and see where that leads.
With vim or ST2, I do my work and don't think about the editor keeping up. With PyCharm, my typing could briefly outrun the editor. The editor would catchup, but it was just distracting.
I don't think the IDE gave me any features that justified this distraction.
Sure it takes a little longer to start up than a no-plugin Emacs or Sublime Text, but it also does a lot more and I don't have to fiddle with it to make it work.
Also, consider that ST2 is in its infancy and how developed its language support already is (see SublimeClang, for example). As ST2 becomes more popular, it might compete with the most developed IDEs.
Wash & repeat ad infinitum.
So I'm much more worried about developer fatigue than bloat in my editor choice.
While ST2 requires configuration to add the bare-necessities people would take for granted from an IDE, if you went with the latter you still have to do configuration to pair things down to the most minimal-environment you’re comfortable with.
Also, it has a modern architecture with useful, up-to-date plugins, not plugins written in 2004.
Because we don't want a slow, Java based IDE, that goes over the uncanny valley in all platforms.
I do use Eclipse, which is not much better than IntelliJ, for Java editing. But I wouldn't bother with it for JS/PHP/Python/Ruby etc...
Ugh, it's painful to read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247386 So much ignorant bias. Just try it. You don't know what you're talking about.