They really need to change the name to something else. I don't know a single person that has used Eclipse in the past and thought that it was a good IDE. I think most of us had no choice but to use it back when we did and just struggled through it.
I share your befuddlement. Eclipse is good and overall better than even paid proprietary IntelliJ. I think there is a lot of bandwagon jumping, especially with newish devs.
I've used Eclipse, Netbeans and Intellij extensively for Java dev. Eclipse is my least favourite. That said, I haven't used Eclipse in years and Netbeans has been lagging in innovation since going to Apache
I use it quite frequently (one of my customers insists on it), and I actively dislike it. No amount of "trying it" is going to make it any better. I hate the look & feel. It gets in my way more often than it helps. It's *slow*. It's a resource hog. And its weird insistence on tying "projects" to "windows" bugs the shit out of me.
Most of these are subjective, but hey, I tried it.
Agree it does them no service using that name. It’s miles worse than IntelliJ or VS. Even if it became much better in recent years (haven’t used it for over 10) its first 10 years have many of us so many scars we’ll not go near it, and we’ll think twice about using something with a similar name or origin.
I know a few who still swear by Eclipse but they are the kind that think the Linux desktop audio stack is great because it’s open source too.