Not to derail the thread too much, but I think there are a couple things to keep in mind here.
First, JuliaHub is still a comparatively small company, so it may not be the case that there is an “extra” full time employee to dedicate to the VSC extension. Same goes for hiring a dedicated developer, is it worth using $100K (salary + benefits + etc) to improve it? Which leads to…
Second, JuliaHub is a company, and the purpose of a company is to make money. “Look how good our VS Code debugger is!” will not convince anyone to buy into JuliaHub as a company, or else their financial team would already have someone dedicated to the project.
Considering that many of the “core Julia devs” work directly for JuliaHub in some fashion, I would say that the company already plays a huge role in the community. As for the ecosystem, I would go back to my first two points, for a small company its not as easy as just “hire a new person”. The alternative to that option would be to make one of the other devs do it. So, then its a matter of priority. Better language server or static compilation? Better debugger or work on core language bug fixes? I’m obviously not privy to the internals of JuliaHub, but I can very well imagine that it is a zero-sum game where every hour spent on the VS Code extension is an hour not spent on something else.
I’ve been on this forum for a while and whenever a person comes by and says something like, “language X has this package, someone should implement this in Julia”, the overwhelming response is, “Julia is open source, YOU can do it!”. I think that applies here, folks who want the language server to be better, or the debugger to be better, YOU help, YOU contribute. Or, sign up for JuliaHub (the product) and pay them to hire a VS Code dev.
And for me personally, I am happy with the extension (a big thank you to all the devs!) and would much rather have JuliaHub focus “extra” resources on things like static compilation, TTFX, etc.
(some of this may come off as more combative than I intend, so please don’t take it that way, I just don’t know a simpler way to make my points)