Hi tra757,
I can follow you and to some degree, I agree, that it would be nice to have one IDE and then a bunch of plugins for each target platform. Today, there are a lot of forks of the Wiring IDE, where the biggest fork is the Arduino flavor, and they actually did a lot of work a year or two ago to make it easier to add in different platforms (they needed both AVR and ARM when they launched the Arduino DUE).
The current editor in these IDE's isn't really that good, there are a lot of functions missing that would be really nice to have, but for beginners and other non-native-coders (a big target audience for this IDE), the simplicity is a good thing.
The project embedXcode is looking at it a bit differently, where each of these IDE installations are seen as "plugins" with all the cross-compiler and library stuff, and Xcode on the Mac is the development environment with all the nifty editor features pro's are used to.
So if you are on a Mac, embedXcodemight be an option for you!
/Thomas
PS: I'm not related to embedXcode, have just tried it and like the effort to bring in a better editor.
PPS: I'm not sure the Edison is supported yet, but likely will be in the future.