Been out of touch with it, but, IIRC, NB's plugin story used to be pretty top notch (hot reload and all). Better than Eclipse and IntelliJ.

Geert W used to write a lot of good articles on doing cool and interesting things with NB, and user stories of how it was being used at different companies to build internal tools. Their GUI builder was pretty sweet too, IMO.

Glad to see it's still around!