Well, let me say there's no going back for me. The Netbeans profiler gives me confidence from knowing exactly what my application is doing, and exactly what that third-party library is costing me. The coverage, allocation stack traces, and jvm heap monitoring are fantastic. Seriously. Take a look: http://www.netbeans.org/kb/60/java/profiler-intro.html

So yeah, I'll take a slice of that action and throw a pole dance in on that lap dance you bet. And it didn't even take me a week before I realised.

Perhaps the only things I missed were getting a method's signature when you hover over it with the mouse, and the live variable value when you hover in debug mode. But these are so minor that I feel if they're not already there and I somehow haven't set them up, they'll be in the next release. But as I said, I get so much more confidence by being able to charge in to my code's runtime and poke around that it's worth it.