I have had equally horrid experiences with other expensive OS' and development tools.
My dilemma has always been with trying to reconcile the differences and find what works best for me.
So who is to blame when a working development environment just "stops" after a week of updates. So Ubuntu had a minor distro release (10.10) - I waited over a month before installing, Eclipse (3.5.2) had a series of seemingly innocuous updates, and the latest version of android development had a minor bump (.7 to .9 release). To make matters even more convoluted, I'm also running an x64 bit OS on top of it all.
What is the issue - the Android project type is no longer available from the Eclipse IDE? Compiler can't reconcile imports, keywords etc. Horrible. So like any good troubleshooter what do I do?
I tinkered with various settings (for awhile - how bad could it be) then I remembered it took less than 30 minutes to set-up before. I un-installed everything (downloaded the latest of all-the-above - installed) - and restarted; no love - no joy - but a slew of half-muttered obscenities.
The real tragedy of this is that I've been working with both Linux::Eclipse and Windows::MonoDroid and I actually preferred the Linux set-up.
It was clean, seemingly more stable (has been a plugin provider for a long time), generally unobtrusive and the resulting program responded better - i.e. very snappy!
So after wasting half-a-day tinkering with Eclipse - I'm removing it completely for now. If I want to develop on the Unix side of things maybe I'll try Netbeans with Android, though it seems younger and potentially more unstable than Windows with MonoDroid (as it is in its .2 release).
I'm so frustrated at this point - I don't know if I'll continue for today. Ah well, live learn.
UPDATE: Just because I can't leave well enough alone. I figured out a solution to aforementioned problem(s). This assumes that you've unpacked the SDK to the same path as before (and that you've already added to PATH).
With the new Android SDK - make sure ALL Shell Scripts have execute permissions (under \tools) chmod +x
Completely uninstall everything from Eclipse.
Delete the .eclipse folder under home (with whatever reside exists in there)
Reboot (for good measure)
Run android script (follow Google destructions as before)
Reinstall Eclipse/ADT Plugins/ etc. -> will be golden afterwards.
MORAL: Living on-the-bleeding-edge hurts (just a little).
NOTES: Not at all impressed with NetBeans 6.9 after trying it out - feels like a work in progress.
