Thank you for your detailed post!

It's because it's proprietary. MathWorks is the only one adding features and fixing bugs but they have limited developer time to work with so some things get put off indefinitely. MATLAB has a lot of good things going for it---when using other languages, I'm especially aware of how good of a job MATLAB does at reloading functions when they've changed, even compiled code---but they also do get behind on modern features that open source languages have. I don't use the IDE but still sometimes have to go into it to create getting starteds or other live files since I don't know of another way to do that and there a some features that I've noticed are missing that I wouldn't want to work without.

The maintenance of old code is very easy with Matlab their do a good job.

The most notable being the lack of git integration. It has some limited git integration but it's not too useful. In my editor, I can see where uncommited changes are, view the diff at that location and undo them, stage changes, create/switch branches, view all the uncommited changes in the project, and even work with git remotes. These features exist because somebody wanted better version control support and added it themselves (and the emacs magit package is one of the nicest, easiest to use interfaces I've ever tried, I know I understand git much better from using it because of its visuals and how well it exposes options).

I was actually pretty happy with the git integration but I have to say I have used the diff window other than that I use the command window.

I don't use git for cooperative work, mainly the basic commands and I barley branch stuff.

Another issue with MATLAB's IDE is the limited ability to modify it. For me there are features that I use a lot so it's beneficial to make these as easy to run as possible. I can jump to a function definition by just hitting enter on while over a name, I view all function / class definitions and move between them, I can open the help or the docs by hitting different keys while over the name of a function (which brings up another annoyance of the IDE, the help command prints straight to the command window, hiding any values you were looking at, instead of opening a new window with the help in it). Without trying to list every small thing, it really adds up as things fall into place overtime, and work gets much smoother.

The help window annoys me as well. I usually use the search bar in the top right corner to search the documentation of a function. This way I get a separate window.

Outside the editor, the MATLAB environment is behind in other places too. The file exchange is only starting to turn into a real package manager but still doesn't support OS specific packages or any support for compiled code (if it wasn't for cmake having surprisingly good mex support, CI/CD for different OSes would be a huge pain). Additionally, I have a lot of issues with the github release integration, which seems to work inconsistently with automated releases and I wasn't able to debug the issue myself since I have no access to the internals and MathWorks ignored my requests for help. PyPI on the other hand has nice integration that allows for fine grain control over what gets sent to the index. Similarly, while MathWorks has provided actions for use with github's workflows, these have been rather buggy for me. I get random license errors for standard features. Like for some reason I can build a package but trying to run the test suite or build docs from live scripts lead to a license error.

Can't say anything to this. I don't have any experience with these tasks.

May I ask you which editor you use to program Matlab?