The Visual Studio IDE has gotten much much worse.

I started with Visual Studio 6 (mostly using Visual C++, and VB6) and it was a speedy. Visual Studio 2003 was a little slower but not bad, 2005-2008 about the same. It was all bearable and acceptable.

Now Visual Studio 2010 is painful and awful. I've got a Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM and the interface is slow, you can see the GUI repaint sometimes. Clicking on the interface causes frequent pauses that take close to 1 second to respond.

Opposite experience for me. 2005 and 2008 were incredibly slow, painful, and prone to locking up or flat out crashing. I don't think I've had one lock up or crash since I switched over to 2010 about 4 or 5 months ago. Also, I can have multiple instances of it open now without my whole computer gasping for RAM. In fact, when I launch a second instance it comes up in a split second, making me feel like the core parts are sharing common resources.

I have to agree with this. VS 2010 is by far the best so far on many different levels as you've already pointed out.

VS 2010 is extremely fast for me, running on essentially the same hardware. Sounds like you've got something else going on there.

Out of curiosity, what are you getting out of Eclipse that you'd like to see in Monodevelop?

I think one of the biggest issues people are facing with MonoDevelop is stability (we get a lot of feedback from users that they get a lot of crashes).

There's definitely a lot of work/polish that needs to go into MonoDevelop and it's something Xamarin knows about and is working hard to fix.

Stability no question, including plugins.