I made a game that uses the Luanti "voxel" engine (MC-likes games of course, but also transposition of other genres), and even programming that is bit of a chore but that's the price to pay to play the game you want to play (there's much more to that than just programming/modding; game design is a rabbit hole).
But I think that it would be more rewarding for those who are curious about programming to start modding, especially in Luanti because it is relatively well documented and it's Lua. In a way, making it rain with the programmable particle spawner the engine provides is a loot box locked by an API, with hints on how to open it in the docs ;-)
The development experience with Rider is also great on Linux. I think you need to be more specific with the complaints because I have many beefs with Microsoft's approach to many things, but I could not pick up on what you meant.
Visual Studio is still not ported to Linux or Mac, you need to use Rider or VSCode. If you use JetBrains for Java, using Rider will feel good no matter where you are.
The GUI library situation is a tough one. In many ways its far more advanced than other languages but their newest attempt is not as good as the older Windows only API. But what other language is graded for its great native GUI library?
I'm not calling MS cool but at the same time I think the goalposts are different.
We dont do the same for java, rust, or c… there are good IDEs for each of them and none are made by the maintainers of the language.
IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.
Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities.
She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it!