That all is interesting... I used Eclipse for several years with a maven project and then tried NetBeans 8. I honestly felt "freed" from a lot of pain. With the "native" recognition of the pom file & it treating all the maven module projects as one shared workspace, working with multi-module maven projects is a sinch. Maybe that that is the critical reason I like it so much, so if your not using maven, it might not be such a good experience. From my perspective, Eclipse is used a lot and also it's hated a lot by people that use it. So it's almost like Eclipse is pushed more by companies (maybe because it is more powerful, has a bigger ecosystem, etc) but not liked by the actual developers very well. However that is all is just from my little perspective, and I can't speak for the broader tech world.