Toward a "modern" Emacs

The original MSVS is 0xDEAD. It's stuck on 32 bits and apparently moving it to 64 bits would be tantamount to rewriting it fully. It's still being developed with incremental features because VSCode is not yet up to feature parity, but that's just a matter of time.

There's no incentive for MS to sabotage VSCode, they want to make sure developers are using Microsoft's tools that conveniently have all these nice out-of-the-box integrations with Microsoft services.

I have no idea what went wrong for you, but my VSCode works just fine with navigation and refactoring support.