I really like PIDA's modular approach to bringing IDE components together. Having an actual vim embedded in the IDE may just be The Best Thing Ever. The plugin architecture has a lot of potential for Zope and Plone development - perhaps a better debugger for Zope, or a WebDAV browser to dig around in your site would be a good place to start.

I find that the existing plugin components are functional enough to be useful, but not so smart that they get in the way of Plone development. For example, I recently spent a full day trying to get Eclipse+PyDev to play nice with Zope. After trying every recipe I could find, I always ended up with the same problems:

• PyDev's error checker could not resolve imports from the Products namespace, which caused it to report dozens of errors that weren't really errors.
  
• If you want to use PyDev's SVN integration, your entire project needs to be under version control. This isn't so good when you're working on a single product. I mean, you can set your project root to be the root of your product directory and SVN will work, but...
• PyDev's package explorer isn't fully functional on modules that are in your project root - it will list them, but it won't parse them to let you explore the classes and methods they contain. So, you can have SVN, or you can have a fully functional package explorer, but not both. For me, this sort of defeats the purpose of using an IDE - what's the point, if you can't use all of the integrated tools?
  

I haven't run into any of these problems with PIDA. Its error checker isn't as smart as PyDev's, so it doesn't try to resolve imports, which means you don't run into any problems with the Zope Products namespace. Also, the SVN integration and source browser plugins "just work", regardless of how you structure your project.

After giving up on PyDev, I did spend a little time with Wing IDE and I can't really find fault with it. Wing's out-of-the-box support for Zope is great! If commercial software isn't a problem for you, I highly recommend it. But if you prefer Free software, either on principle or for financial reasons, PIDA is definitely worth a look.

And remember: "PIDA loves you!"