I don't agree. If an IDE takes better hardware to run than Crysis and is so bloated with features that it makes a Epson HX-20 look like a Macbook Air there is a problem.
People use Visual Studios because they are used to it.
People use Visual Studios because they are used to it.
For performance: If you ask me what is more expensive computationally: Crysis or an IDE; I say an IDE can at least as performance hungry. Nothing strange with that. Try writing code to perform syntax check and autocompletion on broken/incomplete syntax, for a few thousand files, then you'll see what I mean.
I'm very happy to use a monster gaming machine for coding (professionally) if it increases my productivity even just a little.
Isn't that functionally the same as being bloated?
So it's different from "feature bloat" in the regular sense, that is just tons of buttons for things you don't use.
I don't feel that is an appropriate reaction. Just because software is poorly optimized does not mean we should subject ourselves it.
For instance, eclipse does similar (in my opinion better) auto-completion than Visual Studios and it does not take the same resources, by a long shot.
Sure, I'd use an IDE that does what I need but does it faster than VS, in a heartbeat. Obviously. Also, a lot is happening and very few are working professionally in several environments, so compare what they do every day, with what they do occasionally or maybe a long time ago. When I say I think Eclipse is a dog, that probably because the last Eclipse I used was Ganymede (2008) on java 1.5, hitting "run" and getting coffee before my jboss monster had started. I suppose a lot has happened there too.
Most IDE's have much better navigation and autocomplete than VS does out of the box. When I say "VS" I really mean "VS+Resharper" as VS more or less useless without ReSharper. With ReSharper however, it's definitely one of the best IDE's there is, and almost surely the best one for C#, at least until this comes out.
If you look at something like Atom with the Omnisharp plugin, it achieves everything I need from VisualStudio with a tiny fraction of the resources. Then again, if you're one of these programmers who write more code by dragging & dropping around a UI than actually typing (Microsoft has created a whole generation of these coders), then you probably need a lot of the VisualStudio bloat.
"But bloat!" is never an argument. Point to what it actually does to harm your experience if you want to formulate an argument; "it exists" is a nonsensical kvetch.