I am also from the software world and I appreciate a lot that the standard IDE works out of the box. This actually was the single most important point to get me started. However I see no point in sticking to beginner's tools once you move on to advanced. I also evaluated different IDEs. Visual studio is no option for me because I use Linux at home. Eclipse seems also like overkill to me. So I just started to switch to Kate (plus scons, plus ISP plus some trivial python monitoring script). Since Kate allows immediate command line access version control is also no issue. This setup is not tied to any specific editor and beats Arduino IDE by far. It also gives much better control of the compiler. Turnaround for compile + deploy is 2-40s less than compared Arduino IDE (depending on project size). Since then I figured that I am satisfied and feel no need to push this to Eclipse. I figure that Emacs wizards would opt for Emacs and VI advocates for VI though 