In reply to Jon.

Jon, I am sorry to hear about your bad experience with SAS Enterprise Guide.
However, SLOW is not Enterprise Guide itself, but rather inadequate usage of the server where SAS runs. I don’t know your company’s particular situation, but it seems that they either have too small a server for the amount of users it is supposed to serve, its poor configuration, or some network bottleneck. Anyways, SAS EG is just a client software (like a web browser), and like one can’t blame a browser for slowly responding website, we can’t blame EG for slowly responding server.
As for training to be better SAS programmers, again SAS EG does not prevent you from doing that, besides it has embedded Program Editor that allows you to write your programs right there, in SAS EG, and submit them just like you would in the classic SAS environment.