I thought the question was more open-ended than just IDEs. Clearly there is consumer software designed to be addictive, and other software designed to create th

I thought the question was more open-ended than just IDEs. Clearly there is consumer software designed to be addictive, and other software designed to create things which can empower a user to do more than they could without the software. Propietary vs. open-source isn't the issue so much as whether the core idea behind the software is to serve the user or to capture them.