(b) people might suffer through substandard products because they're the only reasonable way of developing software for a platform (you see that sentiment a lot of times from people who claim to be forced to do development on Windows)

Just saying that a single person claiming that XCode is an unusable, horrible piece of shit probably says as much as 1 million apps being written for that platform. At least not about usability of the development environment.

Xcode 5 finally makes it easy to run single unit tests. Before this, you had to create a schema to run a single test, which was several clicks and possibly some typing. Now it's click and run, which is lovely.

It's very telling that Jetbrains managed to pull AppCode out of nowhere and blitz Xcode. I had never before used an IntelliJ-based IDE, but within a week or two my productive increased severalfold. It really puts Apple's efforts to shame.