I might be an old fart (close to 20 years of Windows programming), but all I see is bloat. A compiler, a linker, a debugger. An editor with syntax highlighting, Ctrl-F and Ctrl-H. That's it, this is pretty much all that I ever use in VS. Even plausibly useful features like Intellisense and IDE macros end up being more of a hindrance than a help.
What am I missing? What is there in the remaining 80% of VS that I am not using that is of practical value? Serious question.
Go to definition, Find all references, and variable rename are far superior to ctrl-f and ctrl-h because they operate on symbols rather than strings. When you highlight a variable and ctrl-f for it, you're going to find the 30 times the function is used (if it's even in the same file), whereas hitting f12 takes you right to the definition of it. Symbol renaming is much safer, since you don't have to worry about renaming "i" to "itemIndex" when a loop gets more complicated, and having misc things blow up in your face. Intellisense is really great when you're not entirely sure what order parameters go in, since it shows you what's important as you're typing. I've found them extremely valuable when working on large projects with multiple team members, since a lot of the times I won't have worked on the functions I'm calling to know them intimately.
What am I missing? What is there in the remaining 80% of VS that I am not using that is of practical value? Serious question.