My problem with Netbeans, is they can't seem to build a .jar file successfully with the tutorial project.

I've just downloaded JDeveloper from Oracle.
Code completion works. The documentation matches the release. Debugging works. It's free but they also would like you to buy it for $995, to get support. Ouch.

Once an app is loaded swing seems to work fine.
Are we talking about that long pause between the click and the splash screen, the time Java takes to verify the .jar or class files? Hard to drop security from a Java application.
My opinion is this is where the rep of Java being slow comes from.