Xcode still has some weird bits, but it's greatly improved lately. I well remember cursing the crashing multiple times a day. There are some wonderful additions to it I wish Apple included by default that NSHipster covered recently.
FWIW, Apple has never required storyboard. You can do everything in code if you -really- want to do it that way, no problem. Personally, I like offloading a lot of the visual stuff to storyboard/xibs unless you start getting crazy with custom animations and so forth.
definitely wrong, i've submitted > 10 apps and updates without a single storyboard
There is a third party IDE: AppCode by jetbrains which does most of what you need (and apparently lots of things better than Xcode) but i've never used it for any long periods
Xcode gets a bad rap, but i use it every day and can't remember the last time the current version crashed or did something strange, maybe i'm just used to it by now though
Though I think you're still stuck with xcode ? can you use a CLI toolchain (directly calling clang and so on) to compile, build and sign an IPA ? from the little I've seen of Xcode, it sucks (a lot): random crashes, GUI & behaviour inconsistencies, bad file management, etc...