I don’t find working with C++ in UE4 as difficult as many of the commentators on this thread find it, but I learned it in school and used it in UE3 prior to UE4. UE4 is a huge step forward from my perspective. If you ever tried to make a new project in UE3 ( not talking about UDK or a mod ) you’d see the improvement, there were about 85 steps to follow and a few errors in the instructions. Epic’s response was to it was that it was OK because most people only had to do it once.
But, the middle solution you are suggesting here I think would be great. I would love to be able to toggle Blueprint event graphs between visual and text, and able to edit them outside the Editor in text editor/ide of choice.
As far as needing VAX, Is CLion a viable solution, or is it just as slow as Visual Studio’s Intellisense?