Yes the OTI folks with VAJava were the precursors of Eclipse. We can say the same about Taligent and ET++ too earlier projects that Eric Gamma was involved in. Lessons learned by those groups certainly contributed to Eclipse.

It is possible that the biggest ever dynamic language projects were in Smalltalk. Which sort of leads one to notice the correlation between good IDEs and success. Still, VAJava size was definitely smaller than Eclipse version 1.0. You'll have to try again for something of an order of magnitude bigger.