Osgeld,
it's a slippery slope: Add a little thing here, another little thing there and soon you end up rebuilding Eclipse only on worse. There's a reason why Eclipse is the way it is today. If someone want s to do that with his time, fine by me, I can't care less about it. But one should do a little planning before launching on such an endeavour and not be dragged into it blindly. I've been involved in enough commercial software projects to know where that ends in all ugliness.
For my part, I would prefer if the Arduino IDE team concentrates in fixing the bugs and and focus on the vision they have for the IDE, whatever that might be. My impression was, the main target group for the IDE are beginners, so make it easy for them and forget all about power users. They have enough good other options available and thus matter a lot less.
And just to make things clear: I write my code in vi, because that's the only proper way to do it. IDEs are for wimps anyway. Back in Klondike we'd have been thankful even for ed - we had to hack each bit one by one out of the ice with a rusty hatchet. 0s took twice as long as 1s. Kids have it so easy these days.
Korman