It seems logical that developers will prefer a language that has a good toolset. There are certainly languages I don't develop in as much due to the lack of a c

It seems logical that developers will prefer a language that has a good toolset. There are certainly languages I don't develop in as much due to the lack of a compelling debugger (e.g., Lua). In the case of Javascript though, I don't think many developers were asked if they liked it ahead of time. Really it seemed like it was targeted for the much wider audience of "latent developers" who'd never used a debugger at all and wouldn't know to expect one. This probably contributed to why it took so long for such debuggers to arrive.