Ultimately, MS' business in web development is tied to selling an IDE and Azure. Both have had to change to incorporate the tools people are using (JavaScript), not just the tools MS control (C#/.NET). I agree, the "Embrace, extend and extinguish" philosophy has apparently been replaced with "Embrace and hope to stay relevant".
I think they are doing a good job at handling that change. I don't personally want to be constrained to doing everything within an IDE, and I'd rather use the tools directly than have them abstracted to look like native MS tools, but that's their business model, and it is slick and works for a lot of people.
I can't speak for other teams, but re: NTVS... we definitely dont want to force abstractions upon you. For instance, with the npm integration, we provide UI where it makes sense (exploring/managing your packages, searching for packages), but you can drop into the cmd line or .npm command in the interactive window anytime you please. Think of it as semantic zoom - allowing you the flexibility to traverse the levels of abstraction when it makes sense. Are we 100% there yet? No. But I consider that to be the ideal experience, and we're definitely trending closer to that vision.
Thoughts? I'm especially curious to hear how you think we can improve the existing experience so that it caters better to your workflow. What are some of the abstractions that get in your way?
I think they are doing a good job at handling that change. I don't personally want to be constrained to doing everything within an IDE, and I'd rather use the tools directly than have them abstracted to look like native MS tools, but that's their business model, and it is slick and works for a lot of people.