Right now, updating the built-in editors is in progress (awaiting QA). It’s far from complete, but it adds a lot of ‘smarts’ to basic stuff. Some of what I’d like to add will have to wait for 8.2, because of limitations in APIs such as third party scripting modules.
I would love to make the designer an LSP client, which would allow offloading a lot of tasks to external editors; but to do that we’d have to push designer-local resources to disk somewhere, and there’s some tricky complications there.
Similar complications exist for pushing files to disk and opening in external editors; in addition, opening an external editor such as VS Code wouldn’t work perfectly without some doing because: 1. you wouldn’t have your project scripts in the right spots, and 2. you wouldn’t have autocompletion for any system functions, and 3. you wouldn’t have autocompletion for any Java libraries.
Doing that properly might require the designer acting as an LSP server, which is also a big task.