You're absolutely right about the suffering the the commercial stuff and the open source stuff being more flexible. However, when a product needs to use a cert

You're absolutely right about the suffering the the commercial stuff and the open source stuff being more flexible. However, when a product needs to use a certified toolchain to meet required safety standards, and to be supported using that toolchain throughout the product life, it does have its place. Doesn't stop you using GCC or LLVM in addition for the better diagnostics though. But you would not want to bet with people's lives on the assembler output of optimising compilers, when it comes down to real life critical stuff in production. You could use it, but independently validating the toolchain would be really expensive. The commercial toolchains (allegedly) provide behaviour guarantees that standard compilers do not. Probably more expensive than forking out for the commercial licences in most situations, which is most likely why they are so costly. Doesn't mean that us devs don't wish daily for GCC and LLVM levels of user friendliness and features though...