Not the OP, but I have a subscription to PyCharm through work and still think it's inferior to VSCode. And I don't love vscode...
In general, subscriptions are a high bar for me. You typically pay for them year after year but see minimal improvements. Back when I was doing Java development, I paid for my own copy of Idea just to get to use something good. But I don't think I would do that for a subscription.
I switched from VSCode to Pycharm a few years back. Both are very decent IDE's, but Pycharm feels to me more polished.
Pycharm is like driving an automatic, whereas VSCode feels like driving manual. It is a tradeoff as always, so ymmv.
> I have a subscription to PyCharm through work and still think it's inferior to VSCode
I'm trying to figure out how anyone could think that. Every time I switch to VS Code I feel hamstrung.
What do you find to be inferior?
While I also felt limited in vscode compared to pycharm, it definitely feels more polished. I've had some bugs in pycharm for years with no progress on their issue tracker, and new features feel a bit slopilly implemented.
Also the built-in type checker is just bad
PyCharm is much more sluggish. And I have had a lot more luck using dev containers in VSCode than PyCharm. In general, I find the process of getting an interpretter set up much nicer in VSCode.
Both work for Python syntax highlighting. But I've had several bugs in PyCharm that took several versions to get fixed. To be fair, individual extensions in VSCode can also have bugs, but I've generally found it easier to work around issues because it is less "bundled".