Eagle and Saleae Logic have been through similar debacles recently as well. And your statement that "makers rarely care(s) about software" is absolutely correct and is the root of the problem. The 70's are long gone and the "do it in software or hardware" debate has gone the way of bell bottoms and leisure suits.
Today, we all need both. Software matters and writing good software is hard enough and expensive enough that we all should care about it.
Of course software matters. That's not the point.
My point was that the "makers" rarely care whether the software if paid, free (as in beer) or free (as in freedom). They will use whatever they can get their hands on and it does the job. Many are happy to pay for the software too if the price is reasonable and they get good value for it - e.g. the Mach CNC software or the Simplify3D commercial slicer for 3D printing. The recent Eagle and Saleae debacles only show that most people aren't stupid and won't throw money out of the window when it goes out of their own pocket, that's all.
Personally, I think that the concept of the Arduino IDE is absolutely brilliant for all the obvious reasons. It's a pity that the IDE has largely been left stagnant and that no attempt has been made to implement even a rudimentary debugger (aside from user serial statements).
AFAIK I have heard some musing about adding that but the main problem is that debugging on AVR requires proprietary tools and the debugging protocols are not documented by Atmel, so you must use their dongles/programmers. Also the IDE is multiplatform but Atmel doesn't support anything but Windows with their tooling. There are some OSS tools for the debugging (avrice), but it is not really for beginners and the tools don't really support everything. If Arduino switched to ARM, then it would be different, but the current ARM-based Arduino boards are not exactly taking over the world - expensive & difficult to develop for.
The problem with Arduino is that, as seems to be with most successful, free software, there is an initial spate of highly productive development that then stagnates as the initial development funds dwindle and volunteer developers inevitably drift away. The piece of the Arduino platform that makes it all worth doing has no ongoing revenue associated with it to continue its rightfully-deserved development.
I don't think this is the main issue. The IDE is a fork of the Processing IDE that is being actively developed. And there is also some clear progress visible in the IDE - e.g. the library manager. I think the issue is more that it is simply good enough for a beginner. If you need something more advanced, like debugger support, then you can probably handle Atmel Studio already and debug your Arduino code there. They actually provide tutorial for that. I don't think that competing with Visual Studio/Eclipse has ever been the objective of the Arduino/Processing IDE. It has always been to keep things as simple as possible to enable otherwise
non technical users to work with it.
We know the IDE can be forked, but forking without funding is a pointless exercise. There will be no meaningful change until it is agreed by all that the software has true monetary value and is worth paying for.
Then I wonder how do projects like GCC, Linux kernel, Wordpress, Mozilla and many others survive. Paying for software is not the only model that can be viable. And the Arduino IDE is far from the complexity of any of these projects, so it would be much easier to handle as e.g. a non-profit, with funding coming from both Arduino the company and external sources - donors, companies profiting from the ecosystem (Sparkfun, Adafruit, etc.). BTW, that's exactly what the Arduino Foundation is meant for.
The value of the project could well be in the installed base, community support and perhaps even driving up sales. Ok, that last one is a long shot in the case of Arduino, but it is exactly the reason why almost all vendors give away development tools today. If Arduino LLC kept developing the IDE, they have certainly not been doing it for charity, they are a for profit company.