Everything's been downhill since VS6. I'm only joking, but seriously, does anyone remember how lightning fast VS6 was? That was over 15 years ago with much slower computers. I guess application 'snappiness' has not been a priority for the Visual Studio decision makers.
I've used VS since the late 90s (writing node.js in ST2 now) and honestly appreciate the hard work and cool features that goes into it. The new VS2013 feature that shows how often a function is referenced is useful. I don't get that in ST2 and probably never will. But I've used VS enough that I've become philosophically opposed to it and other similar IDEs. The core of the problem for me was that all the fancy wizards and project templates are not maintainable for MS. There were a number of times I was using some new project type introduced in a version of VS only to find the template was incompatible in the next version (e.g. reporting in 2005). This inevitably lead to a lot of unexpected work when my team would upgrade. Many of the productivity wizards impose hidden debt on their users.
Another major gripe was that VS would get really sludgy for solutions with a great number of projects/files. Take note that whenever you see MS demo a hot new feature, it's always with a very simple solution. Also, VS would block for me a lot, but that was probably due using too many plugins. I'd find that an application freeze of even 2 seconds would distract me. Not an issue I face now with a text editor + repl.
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