I see this claim made in a rant here http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.456646.47 . As well as in various other rants that can be looked up on google using "oracle sucks". Ok, well, if let's say something as low key as Drupal doesn't have an easy to use visual IDE I can understand why, but if this is really true about something as big money as Oracle, why don't we see an entire ecosystem of user-friendly visual tools for basic DBA work on Oracle? I mean, people who work on Oracle work for companies with big budgets, so surely they could afford a license for a fancy "sit tight and enjoy the ride Oracle admin studio" of some sort to help developers do some stuff by themselves without pestering the DBA? Or do these tools really exist and do good job whereas the people doing the rants are simply unaware of them?
If you're deploying Oracle in a large corporate environment, there is an ecosystem of user-friendly tools to administer the database. But most of those tools are relatively painful to install-- they need their own database, for example, and install components on the database server along with the central repository. It makes perfect sense to invest in this sort of heavy-weight infrastructure when you're spending 6 or 7 figures on Oracle database licenses and you need to handle things like continuous monitoring and alerting.
On the other hand, most of the folks that are complaining about Oracle usability are trying to install and run Oracle in a much different environment. If you're a developer, for example, that wants to run Oracle on your local laptop so that you have the full stack installed, you're not going to need or want one of these heavyweight tools. Those folks are going to end up with whatever tools Oracle installs by default. Traditionally, those tools have been somewhat less than ideal. Oracle is getting better about that by shipping a lightweight Enterprise Manager web client with the database that is very useful for these types of installs. But it can still be a bit of a fight to ensure that the Enterprise Manager web client works perfectly on a developer's Windows laptop install which leads a non-trivial number of developers to conclude that "Oracle sucks".