Well I'm your case this makes sense. Speaking for SASS and LESS here, you know you can get a few other apps that'll compile and help you debug your SCSS styles. There's CodeKit, LESS.app, and now Crunch. These tools take you to the line in your SCSS file that's causing issues instead of referring to the compiled CSS.
I mean, hear what you mean but I think the level of annoyance or love for these tools depends on your workflow. Personally, I use LESS along with CodeKit (I used to use LESS.app) and I usually don't have those problems. The times that I do run into a line number reference problem I'm usually able to find the offending code quite easily as the line in my abstraction language file (LESS, Coffeescript, whatever) is usually only a few lines lower than what the debugger tells me. In addition, if the debugging tools give me just a short snippet of the offending code then I can pretty easily remember where it is regardless of how large the file is.
In the end though I think this is all about a person's workflow. Some workflows are better suited to these abstraction languages and their compilers/debuggers than others. Personal preference, I guess, is what it comes down to.
I mean, hear what you mean but I think the level of annoyance or love for these tools depends on your workflow. Personally, I use LESS along with CodeKit (I used to use LESS.app) and I usually don't have those problems. The times that I do run into a line number reference problem I'm usually able to find the offending code quite easily as the line in my abstraction language file (LESS, Coffeescript, whatever) is usually only a few lines lower than what the debugger tells me. In addition, if the debugging tools give me just a short snippet of the offending code then I can pretty easily remember where it is regardless of how large the file is.
In the end though I think this is all about a person's workflow. Some workflows are better suited to these abstraction languages and their compilers/debuggers than others. Personal preference, I guess, is what it comes down to.