I could be wrong because I have not taken on many large scale projects, but too much dependance on an IDE would cause poorly organized code to be written. This is a difficult topic, but I am a proponent on UML and an iterative and incremental software development process. I think that the code should be broken up into components and components can be developed and tested separate from each other until they become deliverables. I think that this is very manageable using Emacs.
