I tried to teach myself scripting in the geck however i quickly tossed the thing out the window and gave up.

the lack of any syntax checking and the complete abscence of even the most basic form of intellisense drove me away from fallout modding completely. now that the game has long since matured and the modding community is well established i was wondering if anyone has made a 3rd party IDE or modified version of GECK that provides better scripting support and the kind of syntax checking and intellisense you find in a fully featured software IDE such as visual studio or eclipse

You might want to give this a try:

http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/41642/?

There are issues with the default GECK in regards to error reporting. Namely it doesn't, which can be rather frustrating. This utility restores that reporting so if you do something wrong, at least you'll know about it, and what the issue is.