I keep hearing the phrase's "once I converted my projects" and "once I got use to Eclipse/WOLips." That's a really big problem for a lot of us who REALLY DON'T HAVE THE TIME!
We don't have the month or more to figure out and acclimate ourselves to Eclipse/WOLips and painstakingly convert all of our projects and frameworks (which I'm still fighting with). Combine this with the fact that now I'll be editing my HTML and WOD files by hand and we're talking a serious loss of productivity. (and time... and money...)
I was in this same position, and I simply waited until I had the time. Converting a project to Eclipse is 50% conversion from the tutorial and 50% learning Eclipse. The development side of things was something I was able to get working mostly in the space of a few hours, for what I would call a medium-sized project, and smoothed over within about a week, as I developed.
My development productivity in general has skyrocketed. Eclipse autocompletion has helped me learn a lot in a hurry about the Wonder API, for example, which I started using at the same time as Eclipse. It also works a lot better than Xcode's. Incremental builds and hot code replace are also a huge boost, because I don't have to wait seconds or minutes at a time for a rebuild so I can verify a one line bug fix. I can instead implement and test the little things as I need to do them without rebuilding. Xcode hasn't delivered on this as of Xcode 2, although I haven't looked in Xcode 3.
Deployment has been a bit tricky. I preferred Jam, frankly, for pure ease of use, and have had a lot of problems with the WOLips Ant system (I have not tried Maven). A lot of them are related to my project having issues that Eclipse cares about where Xcode did not. In particular, handling of web server resources organization within the app wrapper has been a complete nightmare.
I too have mixed feelings about WOBuilder. With all its bugs, it is still faster to bind a WOString to Session.observatory.controlRoom.telescope.positioningInstruments.currentPointingModel.declination using WOBuilder then type it.... And it is less error prone...
WOLips/Eclipse offers auto-completion + Compile-time checking of keypaths (as mentioned above). So the charge of being more error-prone is actually not the case at all. It is actually far less error-prone because the IDE continually shows you up-to-date information on the validity of not only your java files but the components and model-files as well.
While I agree that compile time checking of keypaths is nice it does not equate to faster development. The purpose of WYSIWYG is to eliminate typing as much as possible. And as I said before, even though WOBuilder had MANY faults we are still heading backwards.
And while WOLips development is proceeding (I hope) it may be quite a while before we get the drag-n-drop abilities back (if ever). My biggest fear is that WOLips will reach that magical, OpenSource prone, "good enough" stage and then development with become stagnate as the developers lose interest in it.
So all of that having been said, I agree with this. I don't see it happening at all in the rest of Eclipse, but it sure seems sits like that with the component editor. However, Georg's project certainly sounds interesting and promising, and I'll be excited to see how it works out. Also, the issue is certainly not dead, given the amount of discussion in this thread.
Also, even though many people might not use a feature of EOModeler or WOBuilder, many other people still do and they are desperate to find an alternative before Apple does kill it off.
Entity Modeler in Eclipse is a 100% viable EOModeler replacement, period. Hands down, it is sufficient to replace, and by most accounts far superior to EOModeler. It has been mentioned that perhaps it should also be split off into a standalone application, and I would support that, because it would mean that come Xcode 3 and Leopard, those who wish to use an Ant-based Xcode aren't left out in a the cold when it comes to editing their models (e.g. they don't have to set up a whole Eclipse environment).
In the end, Xcode is a C/Objective-C/C++ IDE. The quality of its Java support in general is questionable, and always has been. Eclipse is a Java IDE, and the difference shows when it comes to productivity developing in the Java language. Ironically... half of the problem with it for WebObjects developers seems to be getting past the fact that it looks and acts like a Java application.