Don't apologize for expressing your opinion! And thanks for the post. I happen to agree with your perspective - the Arduino IDE is nice and simple, but with that simplicity comes lots of limitations. This seems to be a common theme among those of us who came into Arduino from the software development side of things. I've re-installed Windows just to do some more in-depth work with AVR Studio; ideally I'd prefer to work with standard tools under 'nix (make, emacs, Bash in my case). However, I often find that using the vendor's preferred tool suite makes exploration much easier, especially when starting with a new platform.
BTW, there's nothing magical about the serial monitor in the Arduino IDE - it's just a serial terminal. As Visual Studio is a plugin-based tool suite, I'm sure that there are lots of options available for integrated serial monitoring, if it's not actually included in the base distribution. I've seen some *really* neat tooling available from the NetDuino side of things - integrated graphing and monitoring of analog and digital ports on the 'duino, etc.