why use Atmel Studio?

Please don't get me wrong I am not judging the software whatsoever. I just thought I needed some special card to do online debugging. It does mean (I take it) that there is some overhead to get the info from the Arduino to the PC when debugging. And is this extra code gone when in release mode?
And there are plugins for SVN and Doxygen? Those are the only real 2 ones I am using now in Eclipse. But it is true though that Eclipse serves my purpose fine. But that does not mean I should not look further than my nose is long (Dutch phrase :))
I'll give it a try. Btw. The latest version starts up fine (Windows7 laptop with 4G memory, Pentium dual core T4300 2.1Ghz, nothing special)