That's a fair point. I tend to overlook Atom in general because its startup time is slow as molasses compared to VS Code (and especially Vim or Notepad++). However, it's still in early days too, and hopefully will improve over time. Still, VS Code is working toward debugger support and a general "IDE feel" that I'm not sure is in Atom's future. We'll see.

To be honest, as long as VS Code is free-as-in-beer, has a plugin-in system that's flexible enough for the community to go nuts with, and can adequately serve as the primary development environment for an ASP.NET app... then I'm delighted.

However, perceptions mean a lot, and in the long-run I just don't see it getting uptake from the Python/Ruby/Node.js crowd without being open source. More of a marketing issue than anything else (although there's also the concern that MS could abandon it someday).