The take-away I got from your post is if I need to deal with "enterprise-size" crapware I'm better off using IDEs. That is certainly an interesting niche, but why would I ever want to work on "enterprise-size" crapware?
I've used JBuilder, Eclipse, NetBeans, and Visual Basic 6. None of them address a fraction of the things I actually need or like to do on a regular basis (edit files remotely, browse directories, use a shell, actually edit text efficiently). At work my Emacs session has files open in four different programming languages. There's nothing stopping people from writing refactoring tools for Emacs (take a look at Xrefactory), it's just that grep and dired and search-replace are universal tools that are good enough for all occasions. If you need something else it's easy enough to use macros or write elisp code to do it (ever try writing an Eclipse plugin? that works with multiple versions of Eclipse?).
You are assuming that your use case is typical. It's not. Eclipse may be better at your use case, but it fails miserably at the things typical Emacs and vim users need.
> That is certainly an interesting niche, but why would I ever want to work on "enterprise-size" crapware?
Because it pays the bills, and pays them quite well.
> it's just that grep and dired and search-replace are universal tools that are good enough for all occasions. omething else it's easy enough to use macros or write elisp code to do it
Extract a superclass or an interface with them. Automatically and contextually build your getters/setters in Java/properties in C#, respecting visibility and implementing proper logic in the case of constant or final fields.
I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for you to do either. Emacs is nice enough, but it's absolutely silly to claim that context-insensitive tools are "good enough for all occasions."
And I would be pretty easily called a user of both emacs and vim. Both are tools for specific use cases. They are not, as the strange culture of text-editor-worshippers would like to claim, inherently superior as editors simply because you know them.
"Because it pays the bills, and pays them quite well."
Why don't you just go into investment banking or law or medicine instead? All those careers pay a lot more than doing copy-paste on millions of lines of crap Java code, which I highly doubt you like doing anyway.
I pay the bills by doing things I'm interested in.
I've used JBuilder, Eclipse, NetBeans, and Visual Basic 6. None of them address a fraction of the things I actually need or like to do on a regular basis (edit files remotely, browse directories, use a shell, actually edit text efficiently). At work my Emacs session has files open in four different programming languages. There's nothing stopping people from writing refactoring tools for Emacs (take a look at Xrefactory), it's just that grep and dired and search-replace are universal tools that are good enough for all occasions. If you need something else it's easy enough to use macros or write elisp code to do it (ever try writing an Eclipse plugin? that works with multiple versions of Eclipse?).
You are assuming that your use case is typical. It's not. Eclipse may be better at your use case, but it fails miserably at the things typical Emacs and vim users need.