Completely agree. I can't use even the best editor if it doesn't provide basic navigation, and debugging functions. 20 years ago, people claimed that IDEs were bad, but now the situation have changed. PyCharm has almost everything that Sublime has, and even more, there's vim mode, which moved editing to a new level.
I totally agree PyCharm's navigation and debugging functionality are fantastic. That said, when I last tried it (about 2-3 years ago), my Python code ran incredibly slow. I have a relatively large but not huge Django based python project (~2M LOC with libraries), but with debugging enabled my Python code practically ground to a halt. It's possible I misconfigured the debugger, and I can't remember how long I spent trying to get it to work, but it was discouraging enough that I dropped it.
My debugging now is just logging.info and some fancier log aggregation tools, but still feels like the early 1990s.
Pycharms 2017 debugger (pydev), is much faster now. You meed to use python 3.6 though. The debugger window suggests to install some bindings. If you do that the debugger runs much much faster.
They've made some improvements to the debugger recently. Enabling Cython doubles the speed but the biggest improvement is using Python 3.6. They now use the frame eval hook that was added and they claim it's 40x faster.
>20 years ago, people claimed that IDEs were bad, but now the situation have changed. PyCharm has almost everything that Sublime has
Whether "PyCharm has almost everything that Sublime has" is not really relevant to whether people claimed IDEs were bad -- seeing that people didn't claim IDEs were bad for lack of features.
It's the slugginess and especially the "take it or leave it" bundle of stuff that comes built-in into an IDE that annoy(ed)s people.
Anyone who thinks PyCharm is sluggish, needs to reevaluate. I use it inside of VM as my daily driver, the startup is the only "sluggish" thing about it, and even that is negligible. They introduced "zero-latency typing" a while ago.
Also, I'd argue PyCharm has much more than sublime.
I really want to use VSCode, but the one HUGE thing holding me back is lack of a hot key to show/hide VSCode. I use iTerm and am used to opening/closing it with Ctrl + `. Having to use Cmd + Tab and then making sure I actually choose VSCode and note another application that I was just in really slows me down.
