Quartus II and USB Blaster

I see, I don't use these features, so have not noticed the issues.

Personally I find Modelsim significantly more productive for simulation. A testbench should issue sequences to a design and check for an expected response, and you could not do that with the Quartus II or MAX+Plus II simulator.

I code my top-levels in HDL in an editor external to Quartus II so haven't experienced any of the GUI issues you mention.

Again, if you start to use Modelsim, then you'll want all of your files in one language (for Modelsim-ASE), so it helps to have the top-level in an HDL as well.

Cheers,

Dave