VisualD, Mono-D many features unusable

[nonstatement via Digitalmars-d-ide]

I'm new to dlang from c++ and am irreparably spoiled by the 
features available in Visual Studio.

Highlighting, tooltips, autocomplete, 'find all references', 
definition/declaration lookup, etc are critical to my workflow, 
not only for producing code but also for learning the language 
and libraries and exploring existing codebases.

I have not been able to use those features in VisualD or Mono-D.
I am confident that I followed the installation instructions for 
each of those.

The VisualD plugin appears partially functional, the added menu 
appears and 'search symbol' gives the expected results.
There is only very minimal highlighting - keywords and basic 
types only, no user types, functions, or operators - and the 
syntax error detection is absent or broken, failing to detect 
blatant errors while also exhibiting false-positives.
Autocomplete either fails to do anything, or when it does appear 
it shows only a fraction of the expected tokens.
The typical right-click menu features of goto-def/decl and 
find-all-refs do nothing, though that may be normal.

Mono-D is slightly more operational, highlighting is more 
complete although user types and functions are still missed. 
There is no error highlighting to speak of.
Autocomplete works partially. Language keywords, stdlib, and 
basic types are present.
Some user functions do appear in autocomplete, others do not, 
this appears to be determined by their import distance.
Often, a user type will show only 'init, mangleof, sizeof, 
stringof' in its autocomplete, even if it is defined in the same 
module.
Goto-def works only if the desired definition is in the same 
module. The option does not even appear for other tokens. 
Find-refs does not work at all.

I'm sure there are more problems that I missed, and that my 
descriptions could be better, but working around these problems 
has exhausted my patience for today.

The #d irc had some helpful people, but no progress was made on 
solving these issues.

Maybe there is something fundamental I missed in the install 
procedures, I don't know.