You CAN comment  out a whole block  of code  at once, however the command seems
to be missing from the menu (Excel 2003). Do a customise, and drag the
comment and uncomment icons onto the toolbar and/or the edit menu, or
wherever.

You CAN drag a variable  name on to the watch window  (at least you can in
2003). The other way to do a watch is to right click on the variable name
and select Add Watch.

I'm not sure what you mean by "excruciatingly difficult" when it comes to
deleting a line. However, if you mean that the line might have white-space
in it, then that's the auto indent. Actually, I just tried a hang-over from
old text editors - Ctrl-Y will delete  a non-empty or empty line.

I'm not aware of other Excel VBA editors out there, but there might be some.

For me, the VBE editor  is no worse than other editors I use, and does do
nice things like getting the capitalisation right on variables (after
they've been declared) and on key words, and also giving you immediate
visibility of missing keywords, and does also allow immediate compiles and
display of errors.

On the rare occasions that I need to do more complex actions on a module, I
drag it out to the file system and then use a language-sensitive text editor
or text file comparer on it, then overwrite the text back in the VBE. But
this is only worth doing when there is real value-add from the external
program.

List your other peeves with the VBE editor and we'll see if there are ways
of doing them.