Thanks for the thought provoking article, I agree entirely with Andy; and Steve - you really should check out SQL Compare, it's a great product.

I think that a text based environment is fine for change control and production databases, but development has to be done in GUI.

As for GUI environments I use Access 2002 ADP's extensively - although it has a great many limitations, I believe it is far better than EM for working with large databases in a development environment.

I ALWAYS look at code through a GUI envrionment. I think you have to be a SQL guru to understand the complex relationships in a large query in a text only mode. Looking at it in a GUI environment is much easier to understand.