No need to fight boys!
Eclipse is a suggestion. It's no use to me but that's about all.
[...]
I think we've realised that such a framework doesn't exist so I have to make do.
There was no fight at all. My point is simply that there's a gap between a kind of template (easily moddable but require much code) and an IDE plugin (maybe less moddable but requires less code).
The worst is that what you want used to exist but for Delphi. There was a company selling components, one of them was a docking system. In their example they put an base IDE... Now don't ask me to find it again, i saw that around 2010 or so.
Maybe one last things: Object Pascal (+ libraries) is a language simple enough to do everything from scratch. There are not many ways to do things.