[tristan_juricek]

A practical step might be for tool-authors to always ensure their tools are obviously customizable for a variety of initialization needs.

Very few IDEs have made it easy to distribute and maintain custom components. Companies that I've seen have custom Eclipse plugins end up having a specialist, which means that the tool itself is too complex for the typical user to maintain.

Editors, on the other hand, are typically easier to distribute since you have mostly scripts. But since most places I know of avoid forcing the same editor on everyone, and the scripts are editor-specific, this is usually something a company is afraid of.

Few tools I've seen have examples of customization for anything beyond "launch a script". I'd like to see something like "here's how you would manage several background processes during your editor session". Customization needs to be brought into the realm of things typical users should do, not something they merely can, if they think about it.