I have a serious question for the experienced Visual Studio users among you...what, exactly, is so compelling about that environment? I've used VS only enough

I have a serious question for the experienced Visual Studio users among you...what, exactly, is so compelling about that environment? I've used VS only enough to dislike it; I have been genuinely surprised at how inefficient it is. For instance, I once found the GUI so awkward for changing simple project settings, that I started storing the VS project in my Unix home directory (assigned to a drive letter via remote mount), and edited the XML directly with a real Unix editor whenever I needed to change something. Here is an article that has essentially raved about the wonders of old technology, regular expressions. (The author is probably convinced that Microsoft has done wonderful "innovations" here.) A seasoned Unix user has been able to do this kind of thing for years in "vi" and many other tools, yet I think that typing "<escape>:s/old/new/g" is a heck of a lot more efficient than any GUI's dialog box could ever be.