I’ve had no luck with any app in particular over extended periods of time. Spotify has been good, but will occasionally only recommend me stuff I’ve heard a million times for a few weeks straight. My best luck has been following music reviewing sites, or going through playlists featuring artists I like on spotify. This is best with smaller bands, there are less generic playlists with them. Finally, my best bet for finding new music from small artists is simply browsing bandcamp. I’ve found many great artists who aren’t on spotify, and many who are.

As a metalhead, I’m a fan of angry metal guy, as far as reviewers go. RABM on reddit is good too.

the second quote is one of the saddest things I've seen in a while

I’ve been there. I’m not a python dev by trade, but I had to do a lot of python coding while in an Incident Response position for parsing log files from multiple sources before our internal EDR platform added that feature.

VS Pro was miserable. I was issued a 14” 4 core laptop with low clock speeds, and I would be waiting significantly longer than necessary for that bloated IDE to process things, and my usable screen real-estate for code was tiny. It made me miss the neovim setup I had on my personal laptop so much

Thankfully, my boss eventually told me that the allowed software list was larger than what was on the software download portal and I was able to get VS Code and gvim, and I finished that contract with a semi-comfortable setup. If you complain to IT enough, you can probably get a much better IDE.

In the meantime, see if you’re allowed to use jupyter. If you are, you can use the jupyter in browser editor for prototyping and debugging