Man you are preaching to the choir. I completely abandoned actually coding in the engine, then got frustrated with blueprints and thought about just coding everything besides minor things. I had the C++ problem when they switched to UE 4.10 (I think it was 10) forcing me to acquire VS 2015. I already hate Visual Studio and what it has become. I would like to see some other integration like eclipse or CodeBlocks seeing as how both of those are cross platform and what I normally use.
You are right the versioning is Horrible. They push up additions at break neck speed which breaks code. My team has decided to wait for the right version for us and stick with it when it comes out. This post is old and you are probably gone now but there are inherent issues with the way the jump forward never settling on a release version. Many things need to be fixed that have been ignored for the last 2-3 years.
One thing though, it seems they don’t cause old problems on top of new ones. This is pretty amazing to me with the way epic goes about a new release every few months. The problems remain, the toolset gets in the way of creativity and the things you can do once you learn to move around the obstacles is amazing 
I just realized this is probably not a old post seeing as how after the forums got HACKED (because they are using a opensource forum) the dates are wrong. One more thing Large companies get extra support from epic they always have.