> (Visual Studio 6) I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time.

I used it in the mid-90's and yes, it was eye opening. On the other hand, I was an Emacs user in uni, and by studying a bit the history of Emacs (especially Lucid Emacs) I came to understand that the concepts in Visual Studio were nothing new.

On the third hand, I hated customizing Emacs, which did not have "batteries included" for things like "jump to definition", not to mention a package manager. So the only times in the late-90s I got all the power of modern IDEs was when I was doing something that needed Windows and Visual Studio.