This post makes me very sad. I am often reminded that the best tech rarely wins. I've never had to use Intellij until my current job, but it is more obvious to me than ever than Eclipse, at least for Java development, is superior to Intellij. Was the free model not enough to sustain it, unlike Intellij, which sells its IDE, or is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice?

The fancy version costs money, yes, but the community edition is free and Apache licensed. Here's the source code: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

> is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice?

I've used both Eclipse and IntelliJ, as well as JetBrain's "ReSharper" tool in Visual Studio, and while the UI is obviously different, and in some ways better, some ways worse than Eclipse, the actual functionality and feature set of IntelliJ is clearly superior to Eclipse, especially all the refactoring and code smell tools.

The feature list is just incredible and constantly increasing: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/

Also, IdeaVim is way superior to Eclim, if you care about Vim keybindings and modal editing.