You're not alone, that's all I've got to say unfortunately.

MCSP is simple to use but lacks advanced features (source level debugging mainly), isn't aware of some features in added in PBP3 and is prone to crashing on several systems (mine including) which SUCKS.

MPLAB 8 is outdated and lacks support for the latest devices and MPLABX is too bloody hard to set up and apparently Microchip keeps changing things and Melabs can't keep up. It's quite a mess IMHO.