I was in a similar boat. The reality for vim is; generally, the syntax checkers and code completion plugins are hacks, honestly, go read the source code. When I did I was aghast that people were using and promoting them (specifically the java plugins). It's been a couple of years so take this with a grain of salt, imho etc.

I think if one really want's to pick up vim (or emacs) you have to set aside the IDE part of your brain. For example, I still use an ide for java, but I use vanilla vim with no plugins for frontend (html, css, javascript, ember cli). There it's a text editor and that's all I need. Plain vim actually has A LOT of functionality. If one learns the vim way, they might find they don't need nearly as many plugins.

I've always suspected that the fastest way to learn vim is to install the default and not copy someone else's ~/.vimrc at first. Edit it whenever you need some specific functionality, and edit often. Also read the :help docs a lot.

But I admit it would be nice if the vim project shipped a sane default setup that was aimed at the average programmer.

Late edit to the above: I was wrong and outdated about defaults. Someone just reminded me that Vim 8 now comes with better default config.

I've been using ~5 IDEs for the better part of two years now. I tried to hold my leaning-tower of Eclipse together but that didn't end well. I love Eclipse because it has all of the features I need that many other IDEs don't have yet but at the same time it has one of the worst and least intuative plugin systems (funny how that works out, right?). There's no hope for polyglots I think because nothing will ever be developed for us. Companies are usually Java, Scala, Python, JS shops and there isn't much a need for mutli-language tooling but sadly that's what most of what I need.

IntelliJ is awesome for polyglot development.

JetBrains many IDEs*

IntellJ becomes a hob-cobbled mess of half complete plugins if you attempt to push everything into that single beast of an IDE.

I currently use CLion, PyCharm, PHPStorm, Project Rider and a few other JetBrains IDEs but sadly their autocompletion and features aren't on-par with Eclipse's autocomletion and integration into Java. Nothing really comes close to that in my opinion.