I am a C++ coder and my experience with IDEs is almost limited to Qt Creator - my tool of choice. I also use Visual Studio every now and again and it is all right too. I recently had to use Eclipse for the Blackberry 10 development. And boy, what a horrible, crippled environment it is! In Qt Creator I can navigate around my code in seconds thanks to an awesome locator feature. I can quickly jump to any file, class, function anywhere in the project - all through the same interface. Not to mention that being written in C++ Creator is lightning fast. Eclipse is slow to navigate in code and it is just slow. It may be a good platform and a good IDE for Java, but I'd avoid using it if I could. Besides I've always heard about how good IntelliJ is, which probably indicates that there is something wrong with freely available Java IDEs.
I used to share a lot of the views you state but then something happened. I took the time to go through the tutorials and help docs that came with Eclipse. Looking back I think my biggest problem was that Eclipse wasn't what I was used to. At the time I was a Visual Studio user. I think sub-consciously I wanted to be using what I was used to and blamed Eclipse for being different.
I used to hate Eclipse with a passion. Eventually, I read a small poll and 43% of the voters voted Eclipse as their favourite IDE (Intelij, Netbeans, Visual Studio, etc. were on the poll too). I decided to give Eclipse a try and it took a while, but it's my favourite IDE now.
For C++, I think the CDT for Eclipse gets all the value add features right (ie. Implement Method, New Class and Outline. Although Visual Studio used to be my primary IDE, I now have a hard time navigating it and I feel like I'm missing all my favourite features. I guess it's just what we're used to.