I started my work on the J2ME era as well. Had to use textpad for development, and maybe eclipse at some point (which was pretty decent). Tools and simulators were all over the place.
It’s so funny when people complain about the $99 fee for the Apple development program being developer-unfriendly. Back in the day, RIM/BlackBerry wasn’t so much developer-unfriendly as much as actively hostile towards developers. Basically, if you weren’t a fortune 500 company you could fuck right off.