Hello Andre,
Sorry for the delayed response. I understand your viewpoint (and the MSFT business model). I work with a variety of SMBs including evals from NXP, TI and (now obsolete) Intel where the development toolchains had inertial handicaps - nothing against Eclipse though.
Blinking LEDs using an interrupt handler is a great idea (we do it with other low cost SMBs too) but once you start thinking of a handful of LEDs, initializing the interrupts in a general purpose way gets in the way of self-study exercises where the objective is quickly drill down on a feature and then extend it to real-world applications.
BTW, I have a shrink-wrapped copy of the first edition of Visual Studio whose cover was signed by several dozen MSFT folks who were (and some still are) household names. I been there ever since and with TFS since inception. No issues there!
Regards.