Oh, I am with you on this as well. My point is that we never get to the point where network effects (or lack thereof) is the problem to solve. Since nobody is financing the work we simply never get to find out if a proposed external tool would be accepted by the community or not. That's the disappointing part. We never had the problem to begin with.

IMO if you make such a tool for something extremely popular like Python or Javascript and then start pivoting upwards from there, people will be coming to you. There are a lot of deficiencies in the everyday work of the programmer to this day.