wushutwist,
While I see your point, I think that many of these products are WAY overpriced. $3000 for JBuilder? Are you kidding? That and the fact that their release cycle is about 6-9 months means you sink 3 grand into an IDE only to find that they've fixed a bunch of bugs 6 months later and the only upgrade path is to essentially pay full price for the new version.
I had a less than stellar customer support/sales experience with Borland when I was considering buying the academic version of JBuilder Enterprise that I won't go into.
Face it, by the time you pay this kind of money for an IDE, UML tool and several other developer 'must haves', you've sunk the better part of $10k into software for your developers--for each and every one.
I'm not sure where you work but my department can't and won't allocate this kind of money for developer tools. We'd be looking at over $100k in software. In fact, all the developers are working on 3+ year old workstations with 600 Mhz CPU's and 256MB of RAM or less. We'd like better workstations but convincing them that a $1000 workstation will increase productivity several fold is a hard sell. I probably couldn't persuade them to buyt this kind of software even if the IDE wrote half the code. Senior management just doesn't see the ROI.
It's ironic, however, that they will pay 100's of thousands of dollars for enterprise Microsoft licenses, however, but won't even look at open source stuff like Linux, OpenOffice, etc. That's why we use mostly opensource tools like Ant, Vi/Emacs, junit, canoo and cruise control.
I agree with the prior poster that IDE's should be free. When I sink tens of thousands of dollars into an app server like Weblogic, they should provide a full fledged IDE for free. Hell, you'd think that since Borland and Weblogic have partnered up that this would be the case
</rant>