I share your befuddlement. Eclipse is good and overall better than even paid proprietary IntelliJ. I think there is a lot of bandwagon jumping, especially with newish devs.

I think the point of the comment was how Eclipse was perceived in the past, not how good it is today.

I've used Eclipse, Netbeans and Intellij extensively for Java dev. Eclipse is my least favourite. That said, I haven't used Eclipse in years and Netbeans has been lagging in innovation since going to Apache

I use it quite frequently (one of my customers insists on it), and I actively dislike it. No amount of "trying it" is going to make it any better. I hate the look & feel. It gets in my way more often than it helps. It's *slow*. It's a resource hog. And its weird insistence on tying "projects" to "windows" bugs the shit out of me.

Most of these are subjective, but hey, I tried it.