This is my exact gripe. I appreciate that they've invested a serious amount of time and effort into creating an entire language for the JVM. But I am bummed about how tied it is to the IDE experience. Writing Go or Rust in Vim is relatively painless. I've written a few minor things in Kotlin and Kotlin/Vert.x and the non-IDE experience is pretty craptastic. Almost all docs assume you'll write some code, and some IDE will automatically add imports for you.

I left the Java world because I couldn't stand having to have all of the hand holding just to achieve simple goals. I'm not saying Java or Kotlin are _bad_ languages at all. Perhaps I'm just bugged by the general attitude that "everyone will have IntelliJ".