They definitely don't seem to care about performance or bugs very much, but it should be noted that the latest version starts up much faster even from cold storage. I used to look at the splash screen for ~8-10 seconds, but not anymore. It was the first significant performance improvement in a very long time.

Other than that, I agree with you. In addition to well-known performance issues and longstanding bugs, I'm also still waiting for features like full Wayland support that was promised by the end of 2020. I mean, I understand it's not on their highest priority, but why promise things you're not actively working on?

I'd suspect that it is a combination of the following:

a) a lot of existing code that needs to be untangled (e.g. moving various tasks to not depend on indices);

b) figuring out how to avoid unnecessary re-indexing (e.g. the downoadable index caches for things like Java files);

c) having to define a migration path to spread out breaking changes to give plugins enough time to adapt.

IIUC, some of the performance work with the latest version is due to parallelizing the various background processes, which uses coroutines, so you could add "implementing language, library, and tooling support to Kotlin/Java" to that list.

Full Wayland support depends on OpenJDK. It was supposed to ship in 2020, but that's Java for you...