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I liked this article, and I recognize the role it plays in the promotion of Eclipse, so I voted for it. However, authors of articles like this are going to have to start cutting their teeth on more detail coverage, or perhaps alternative means to educate the community on the power and singular uniqueness of the Eclipse platform. It can be frustrating to see a lot of articles that regurgitate the same general overviews again and again simply because time has gone by, and the first time the article only reached a small set of the community.

That being said, I think there is a still a few more opportunities for articles of this general flavor before I go totally postal :) - I realize that I am exposed to a lot more of the same because I am immersed in Eclipse 'media' everyday.

I find working with Eclipse plugins horrible. Every experience has been package retrieval hell only to find it not work despite clearing caches and messing with various update mechanisms. Plus some general questions make me go "huh?", like their packaging stucture vs jars which is already a package distribution format.

In general I love working with Eclipse despite it's plugin nastiness, but I don't think this is the best aspect of it to highlight.

For a system that *truly* got plugins right, look at the highly underrated JEdit. Initially only a 1.5 MB download, it grows into an IDE with it's extensive plugin base which includes things like consoles, builders, media, code beautifiers, syntax checkers, auto-completes, virtual file system, and integrated scripting component. And that's just scratching the surface. It's really a nice package, and I favor it for everything Eclipse hasn't been able to deliver on yet. HTML/XML/JS and other language editing.

I think the fact that "it's just safer" to download and install the Web Tools Platform as a seperate Eclipse installatin really goes a long way to show Eclipse isn't quite there yet.