I think one thing they need to focus on is making extensions easier to create.
I'm a big fan of Intelli-J, but VS Code is eating their lunch with AI agent plugins. I'm assuming it's because it's much easier to create them on that platform.
The same pluginm from the same team, on Intelli-J always works much slower, feels clunkier and is prone to crashing.
It's a shame
Ah, I'm glad I'm not missing out by using Visual Studio. It's probably even slower in VS, I'm sure. I've been dual wielding VS for building/running and VSCode/Cursor/claude-code/codex-cli for AI editing, and it's a much better experience. Although if it wasn't so shitty in VS, I would do it all in the same UI.
EDIT: I'm especially pissed at Microsoft for not improving VS's rendering speed. They are all about making its backend services async, spinned out to external processes to be able to use the latest dotnet version, while the main IDE process is stuck in NET 48 seemingly forever, with zero improvements made to rendering performance. Perhaps the Vello Sharp news I'm hearing recently will kick MS into gears (one can hope).
Which plugins have you compared? I think plugin devs of this generation are only target vscode clones because if it gives them coverage of vibe coders who are happy to pay even for dubious quality.