Good advice, but having got it working with IPE why bother with MPLabx?
No reason, but IPE comes as part of the MPLAB X download/installation - I don't think you CAN download IPE by itself...

From memory theres a CLI (or similar) within IPE to allow programming from PicBasic IDE (ala PK2 et al)
Yes, and I'd bet that under the hood the IPE application calls upon that same CLI when programming so once the Snap is working from within the IPE application setting it up in MicroCodeStudio shouldn't be too hard.