I don’t think that SCIDE is an amazing IDE, but I do think that it is great and do its job pretty well. Is it costly to maintain? I can’t say.
But based on this:
I assume that removing the IDE will block several artists from accessing SC. I’ve attended to the previous International Live Coding Conference (ICLC) and I was impressed with how big the scene is, also impressed that around 10% of the people were using sclang, scide and scsynth together as their main live coding platform (which is easy to understand).
If SCIDE could also ship tidal natively I think that the SC community would grow more faster, but I understand the amount of work necessary plus the coordination with tidal…
Moreover, adopting some general IDE as the main substitute for SCIDE, I assume it is also problematic. Several projects relied on Atom as their base IDE (including Tidal) and suddenly Atom was over… + the problem of installation: SCIDE is also great because it is super easy to install, a great entry point. + the difficulties of customizing a general IDE for having a docked help, server meter, run all the shortcuts, etc…
IMO, having a personal IDE is not waste of resources. If this was not the case, big environments like Matlab, Python, Processing, Latex, would never have done so…