I work as a consultant at a large fortune 500 company and have been writing .net for years. My colleagues are top notch senior .net and Java developers, not because they came from a bank, because they all have been writing .net since it came out, ARE GOOD AT IT, and regularly practice other languages. This post erks me.
I will admit, VS 2015 has some issues, its less reliable than its predecessor, (the new nuget package manager is horrific) however its still an amazing IDE. I will also admit EF can have a bunch of little frustrating facets if you don't know all the intricacies. Read an EF book. What I will disagree with you on is that senior .net developers have never seen the sun and will never know that their lives suck because they haven't experienced anything else.
We have an enormous code base in .net with priority in millions of dollars, we use EF at the core and we do not run into issues like you describe because we know how its used. This tells me your developers, while maybe very good developers in their own right, are not as experienced in .net like you say.
You said you love EF when it works, well learn why it isn't working when its not working, and you will fall in love I promise.
I will admit, VS 2015 has some issues, its less reliable than its predecessor, (the new nuget package manager is horrific) however its still an amazing IDE. I will also admit EF can have a bunch of little frustrating facets if you don't know all the intricacies. Read an EF book. What I will disagree with you on is that senior .net developers have never seen the sun and will never know that their lives suck because they haven't experienced anything else.
We have an enormous code base in .net with priority in millions of dollars, we use EF at the core and we do not run into issues like you describe because we know how its used. This tells me your developers, while maybe very good developers in their own right, are not as experienced in .net like you say.
You said you love EF when it works, well learn why it isn't working when its not working, and you will fall in love I promise.