What development environments do most BB devs use out there? I haven't programmed much Java in 6-7 years and typically used NetBeans or JCreator for projects as I found Eclipse cumbersome. RIM has the plugin for Eclipse, but I've also read some posts where people are using whatever editor they want and then using ANT for builds and testing.
I'm coming from .NET so obviously I'm a heavy VS.NET user.
There are a number of specific free development environments provided by RIM, and which you can download, including an Eclipse plugin.
I would recommend using both RIM tools. Eclipse plugin is good for development and now even supports hot-swap debugging on the Simulator. But if you need on device debugging and logging - for me, only JDE worked correctly, so I keep both these tools in my toolbelt :)
If you want to try the ANT route, it's possible, for example look at Wordpress BB application, it shows a good way of working with BB project and ANT. IntelliJ handles it pretty well.
Your supported options are JDE (simply not very capable compared to any modern IDE), and Eclipse. For widget development, the VIsual Studio plugin supports VS 2005 and 2008 (I don't think 2010 is yet, but I expect it won't be far behind.)
I've gone through great pains trying to stick with Netbeans (Eclipse makes me itch), but eventually had to give up and switch to Eclipse. The support simply isn't there; I was able to get the basic debugging to work with Netbeans, but that was just about it. Simple things like "break on uncaught exception"; or localization handling (if using string resources) were either not possible, or very inefficient.
The JDE is adequate for debugging, if only barely. However in my experience (especially in the very latest versions) there's no difference at all between the JDE and Eclipse debugging features.
The other option you have is to use the IDE of your choice; and ant-based build scripts. That would let you use . You will still have some pain points (mostly localization handling), but it would do the job. The Blackberry Ant Tools project can be found here: http://bb-ant-tools.sourceforge.net/docs. In this case you would still want to use JDE/Eclipse for ease of debugging, but would be able to do most of your development in the IDE of your choice.