There are already a lot of replies, but let me sum it up: 1. People don't spend much effort on configuration unless they like the process. 2. You won't get "narrow slices" of functionality. You win at some things, you lose at others - similarly to situation when you compare programming languages. 3. "Comes out of the box" equally applies for a canned IDE, and for Emacs/Vim (it's not forbidden to download other guy's conf from github). The real difference is "sealed box" vs "open box". 4. You are not obliged to like other people's ways, but really do you believe that multitudes of experienced developers decided to suffer constantly while writing their code? Seriously?