Sarcasm aside, what are some benefits of .NET? I've only briefly used it, and I hated the whole experience (probably because I really don't like Visual Studio). I want to keep an open mind though, what am I missing out on?
Most .NET devs (myself included) really enjoy the Visual Studio Environment. So, if you prefer a text editor like vim, it may not be the right tool for you.
The debugger is hard to beat (as Jeff mentions). C# has kept up with most features (LINQ, dynamic, async/await, etc) that are available in Ruby, and the CLR is quite fast. The core libs are also very solid. ASP.NET MVC is very comparable to Rails.
There are a bunch of downsides as well, but they are well-covered by OP.
Don't open your mind too far; having an opinion is not always a terrible thing. You already said you don't like a large chunk of the typical tooling, no comment will make you like it. I like using Visual Studio even if it is not the most pragmatic choice, especially for open source. I am not a robot and I doubt you are either.
> what am I missing out on?
I'm not really sure what you know but the answer may be nothing. I have been playing around with code contracts and expression trees a lot recently, I think that stuff is neat. The thing is though that most other languages & frameworks have this stuff too.
