Who is "we?" I use pretty much vanilla vi/vim and SublimeText (or whatever comes next) so I'm not ever hamstrung a possible lack of tools.

I see this attitude as being like a lot of hot rod restoration people I've known: they like working on cars, but seemingly not necessarily driving. They don't ever want to be done, so they keep finding broken stuff, and the end result is that their "tool" is always broken. The Lego castle can always use another brick, you know? When do they ever drive, and if they do, are they happy when they do it or are they complaining inside the entire time? "Engine feels a little rough" is "my computer seems slow" is "that could really be automated." To me it's all just stuff that is other-than-coding. Pretty much just give me a fuzzy-filefinder with `screen` and I'm good, I gave up tinkering quite a while back.

From OP: "Programmers are persistently frustrated in our tools-- when you can see how things work, you start to see just how broken it all is. Things that should be easy are hard, things that should be hard are nearly impossible. And for every thing gotten right, there's something a little subtler that's completely and opaquely wrong, wasting days of your life. We hate our tools, and we love to complain about them."

"We" is programmers as a group, in

> We're in a funny profession where we're both the people making and using the tools.

I don't mean that every single programmer is making and using the tools, just that the skillset for making and using the tools is pretty similar.

Note that I said "we can go <bla>". I'm not really advocating stopping what you're doing to tinker with your tools. It's just that it's often a tantalising possibility which people in other professions are less tempted by.

As you say, though, if you want to get anything done, you have to resist the temptation.