The thing is, we're trying to make OS/2 usable for solving actual tasks of nowadays. You have a different goal; you want to have fun with Warp 3, which you're not gonna use as a primary OS... I suppose, never. There's nothing bad in this, but the situations differ slightly. 
Well, it used to be my primary OS in the 90ies, before Win95 came and completely deleted C:\OS2, while letting everything else on C:\.
I did the usual things with OS/2, a 13 year old does... getting known to what it can do if I click here and there, learn how to launch games, find out how to render my dad's PC usage restrictions useless, try out and learn the basics of QBasic, QuickBasic and PMREXX, also CoBOL.
Later I found out about Linux and C++, and also that I can write things, when I miss a tool, or the existing ones don't meet my requirements. I did this on Windows and on Linux also, until I made this hobby my job.
Of course I planned to write things that I miss for OS/2 Warp 3 also, if necessary. The thing I usually do. Miss something? Find out how and write it. Time and efforts never were an issue.
But your recent overview about the situation is.. quite disappointing. Do developers really only do what they want? Didn't they team up to achieve the higher goal?
Like for instance build some platform that is above all the different libs, kernels and dlls, which all new tools depend on. Instead of that, currently people are developing things for the numerous libs and dlls, that need to be adapted to the existing OSes over and over again.
Microsoft did something good with .NET. - A framework, that makes applications written for that framework, run on all Windows installations that are supported by .NET. - And these are quite a few. Would not that be a model for OS/2 also?
This can, of course, not make up for the lack of drivers for current hardware, or missing kernel modules. Absolutely right. But that is a problem, that most communities suffer..... industry support for "free" software is quite poor, as the industries' driver is money, not ideals.
So.. to return to the initial quote: Yes, I planned to have a look at Warp 3 again, together with my newly refurbished 486er, as they already were a good couple decades ago. No further goals planned.
I would have never thought, that people still actively use Warp 4.xx or ECS as their primary operating system. I can almost imagine how much "fun" it must be to look for a NIC driver or modern graphics card.
Had good fun already to get my non-connect Warp 3 into a usable status, thanks to you and the other good people in this thread! Installed numerous libs and dlls, fiddled here and there to make Z work, which requires Y, which requires X and so on.
But.. to make Warp 4.xx or ECS to run on recent hardware is a completely different level than this and developing some neat tools for this and that. - This requires a wide base of developers dedicated to their specialised field. How can this be done? And how did it work until now? Reading articles, I found out, rights on Warp are still with IBM and the owner of ECS have changed two or three times?
Not a good development at all, also as the source codes aren't open..
Might be indeed easier to go for something from-scratch.. based on free software that already exists. - Which brings me to the question... what is the motivation to keep using OS/2 as the primary operating system, if not "for fun" (to see how far it can get)? - Do you use software, that only runs on OS/2, which has not been ported to anything else, or.. why all this?
No general modern mainstream code editors or IDEs.
Oh! True! I was looking for such a thing already. Hmm.. too bad to hear there are none.
So a text editor and gcc & emx is THE way atm?
Speaking of... the vanilla text editors on Warp3 appear to cut a line after 256th character, so I switched over to vi(le), which does the job. Can you recomment GUI text editors? (If possible even with syntax hilightning.. as the file viewer in File Commander/2 does)
Many other things were done by the community; okay, with sponsoring.
I am completely fine with that sponsoring model, as long as it leads to quality software, that eases people's everyday software needs. Already thought about buying the File Commander/2, as this feels like a solid tool for everyday work! - Until it launched into a memory exception, and I found out by comparing, that an empty file is the culprit. Deleted it... and it kept launching again. An author cannot allow such bugs in paid software. Sorry, but this is not on release state yet. Even it is a port to OS/2, it needs to be tested before release. :-]
Until now this has not yet occured again.. but I am keen to see which surprise will there be tomorrow.. =)
Strange issue. Please try this:
http://rpm.netlabs.org/release/00/zip/coreutils-8_6-10_oc00.zip
This package runs perfectly on ACP2 and eCS 2.1.
And I don't have gcc445 shared runtime library installed in my systems.
Oho! I'll give this a go shortly. - Thanks!