In the proprietary, NIH world of embedded software, vendor often ship development tools whose quality ranges from flaky to totally broken. With tight deadlines to ship devices that will be obsolete within months, investing time and people to support robust dev tools across multiple platforms is deemed a low priority. printf() debugging is often the only reliable (and portable) option. :(
Sadly, the open world is not immune to this. I've seen Eclipse's remote Java debugger intermittently fall over with bizarre JPDA errors, and spewing to log4j was also my quickest workaround. I'm not invested enough in the success of Eclipse, or Java for that matter, to contribute fixes.
