I'll start with my bias as someone building a VS Code extension that I can see why folks forked initially, but don't see the need.

There's so much you can do as an extension and the Microsoft team behind it seems to be rational and listening to the extension community about their needs.

I do think Microsoft needs to find a way to host a conversation that discusses why folks must fork and how they can provide APIs to make the tools more configurable.

One big problem for extension programmers in the world with AI chatbots, is the extension is sandboxed and there isn't cross extension communications or a message bus. If there was that standard and a way to send messages, then my extension could push to a AI chat bot. This is a UX shortcoming I'm seeing.

There are also limitations in the ability to overlay UI/UX on top of the editors, e.g. to add comments or annotations that are persistent.

That said, these aren't reasons to fork in my view. I think you a get a good enough experience.

Anywho, I'm new to the eco-system so maybe I'm an optimistic idiot, happy to be wrong.