>The amount of work needed to get a basic IDE up and running for your languages of choice, even for commonly used languages such as Python or Javascript, is far too much for someone who wants to get on with their day job or hobby coding and doesn't want to spend precious hours fixing obscure issues in Lu

Can't agree with this at all.

I don't think I've spent more than an hour in total setting up my vim config back in a day and maybe 1-2 hours in total when migrating to neovim (lua, packer etc) and then migrating to Lazy.

Yes, you have to spend some time building your own DE, but at least now you know what it can really do, all the hows and whys.

>Furthermore, the community does not have a good culture of documentation and learning

Most of the plugins have docs that can be accessed via (neo)vim itself. Usually you can find all information there.

>Setting up that plugin will require another plugin, and so on until you end up with a Jenga tower of dependencies...

Not true at all. Only a few plugins have strong dependecies and even then you rarely come across a plugin that will have more than one dep.

Haha 1-2 hours ... Maybe things have improved since 2018 but I was up to about 25 hours and still not satisfied with the results. That might be just being a perfectionist or coming from another IDE and trying to replicate something. But 1-2 hours is not a reasonable amount of time to set aside to set up a truly usable custom ide with neovim to acquire the knowledge to drive it.

One can never be satisfied with the results. "There is no endgame", right?

1-2 hours is more than enough to get to work with autocompletion, syntax, filesystem explorer and a few more plugins for your convenience.

>coming from another IDE and trying to replicate something

This. Some people try to replicate IDEA or something like that. Obviously you can spend weeks trying to do this

Hell, configuring https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap + https://github.com/rcarriga/nvim-dap-ui can take a week alone I guess.