> up to speed in a new environment

are you assuming that every time a developer switches job, he or she has to learn a new IDE. Life isn't like that.

It's not impractical to assume that a user will use a specific subset of all of the tool offerings and doesn't need or use all of what the application has to offer. The app should be able to develop a profile based on what the user actually does with it instead of forcing all of the functionality onto them.

But Adobe makes a lot of money with their product, has no competitors of note and therefore doesn't have to change the way they do business because even if their subsequent releases fail to impress their user base, they're still going to sell licenses.

The problem is that beforehand you don't necessarily know which features you are going to need to use. I am constantly discovering new useful features in most of the programs I use, having to install plugins for every feature I wanted to use would quickly become a pain , hamper discoverablity and the program would probably just end up back where it started in terms of size.

Besides when you have a program with a long load time, this is not necessarily correlated with the number of features, it's more likely that it's some core part of the program that is taking a good chunk of the initialization time.

The consistency argument is important, especially to anyone who has ever worked on telephone tech support. Being able to give somebody instructions on how to perform an action without having to worry about which of the 1000s of possible configurations their program is in is important. This is probably one of the big reasons desktop Linux never took off.

Most professional programs like IDEs or photoshop are intended to be used by professional users anyway who will be likely to have a reasonably fast computer and will have invested some time in learning to operate the program properly.

Adobe has actually had quite a few competitors over the years, currently there are programs like PixelMator and in the past they have had JASC , Corel, Macromedia (until they bough them) and of course GIMP to contend with.

Joel Spolsky has a good article on this. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

Based on what you're writing, I detect that you have little experience in a [pro-level] multi-discipline working environment and you're assumptions are at best broad guesses.

GIMP to contend with? Adobe could give two shits about that app, its user base and the Linux community in general.