Is it advisable to stay stick to Arduino IDE?
It's simple because it has to be accessible to everybody, and that works: everybody and his little sister can program Arduino.  

If you feel you can handle something more like Real Programming I would certainly do so. You'll have to write more code, but also will have more control. An important point: the Arduino library is horribly inefficient: functions like DigitalWrite and DigitalRead can be made up to 50 times faster.