GarethJ MSFT
Hi Dr Borts,
I'm from the DSL Tools team.
There isn't a technical reason why the tools aren't available in Standard. As you say, different versions of Visual Studio are designed with different sorts of users in mind. We looked at the type of user we were targetting and it is very much a software professional who is looking to move her organisation or her customer's organisation towards more productive and more industrialized development using techniques within the Software Factories initiative.
We're aware however that bringing models as first class artefacts into the development process means that there will be categories of users who will be being asked to use Visual Studio for the first time, specifically to make use of a DSL-created designer, (perhaps a business analyst). Customers told us that forcing such a person to have Pro installed didn't make sense if they were ONLY using it for the DSL-created designer, hence the ability to deploy DSL-created designers into Standard.
I hope this makes some of our thinking clearer.