My problem is that Eclipse appears, in early use, to be a steaming pile of poo compared to Visual Studio
Yup, that's my view after using both for years.
Some people say NetBeans is better than Eclipse but more say that it's worse; I don't think they're that different, myself, unless you're doing Swing GUIs in which case NetBeans wins because it does actually have a half-arsed attempt at a dialog editor (Eclipse has nothing). I don't have any other suggestions. Maybe for my next job I'll refuse to do Java so that I can go back to using some decent tools and spend my time building code rather than fighting tools.