I understand there are always two significant reasons for not changing aspects development methodology within a company;
1: From a company perspective; change has an up front cost in time and complexity
2: From an employee perspective; some people like to stick with what they know and are comfortable/productive with.
Conversely there are the two often touted reasons for adopting change:
1: It will save time (money) in the future.
2: Some people always want the latest thing/want to make everyone use the thing they had at their last place because they are productive/comfortable with it.
Disregarding those reasons for the purpose of this discussion, I'd like to get a balanced view on where eclipse is worth adopting and where it (currently) brings no benefit. As well as whether it can be used in parallel, e.g. can different members of a development team chose to work predominantly in Eclipse and others stick solely to the workbench.
Just to give you my initial position on this subject; I am brand new to SAP/ABAP (2 months in) and come from a Java background. Understandably I start as an 'I want to stick to what I know because I'm very productive/comfortable with it' proponent. Having broached this topic with the Lead Dev, I'm not satisfied with the reasons given for not allowing me to trial Eclipse - not that I don't believe them, just my lack of familiarity with ABAP and SAP means I don't understand them fully.
For example, one of the reasons I'm being dissuaded from Eclipse is "it's actually going to cause other issues, like the way SAP handles their lock objects." At the moment this all Greek to me, but I'd expect this either to be a known issue with well understood workarounds/good practices to mitigate it or that this is a fundamental issue dissuading all but the most bleeding edge technologists from adopting Eclipse.
Secondly I've been told that the Eclipse for ABAP platform was developed primarily for SAP Business One development, not ERP development - again this is a point that I can't argue with due to lack of domain knowledge, but the foolishly optimistic side of me wants it to be not true; surely ABAP is ABAP whatever you are developing with it.
So, first off, if these questions have already been answered simply point me to the right place, otherwise can you guys give me some food for thought if not a definitive answer?
Thank you.