I wasted far more than $1500 worth of time trying to set up Eclipse, gcc and a debugger, and failing.
I don't doubt that the software is theoretically very capable, but I'd urge anyone advocating it to take the usual internet advice of "do a search", and take a look at what documentation a Google search actually returns. There's a huge amount of stuff out there that's irrelevant, outdated, hard to navigate, or otherwise just plain useless unless you already know what you're looking for and where to find it.
If I were still 16 years old with a computer, no money, and a lot of free time on my hands, then maybe I'd have persevered for longer, but I'm not. I'm a professional engineer with a job to do, and time is money.
I bought CrossWorks, installed it, and it worked. I was immediately able to plug my PC into a dev board, download some compiled C code to it, and debug it. No issues at all once I'd got beyond the "wow, that's a lot of icons" stage.
A year later it still "just works", and when I do need tech support, I have someone to email or call, and it's actually their job to answer. None of this "post on a support forum and hope" crap.
The underlying compiler is gcc, so its code should be identical to any other IDE that uses gcc.