I have to agree... I'm still using the bash that comes with git for windows. It actually works (mostly) as one would expect it to work.
Also, not being able to edit the WSL filesystem from inside a windows editor is a huge loss in terms of usage. It's worse than using Samba/CIFS to share a directory and edit across to a full VM. I happen to like my gui editor, but prefer to run in Linux.
If you had to you can touch things in the WSL VolFS by browsing the appropriate %AppData% subfolder. I'm presuming Microsoft isn't encouraging that right now with this Interop tooling for several reasons.
At a guess one of them might be that apparently the Unix things like permissions and Unix-style metadata are stored in NTFS alternate streams (~"resource forks") that they may be worried some Windows programs might not handle quite right (ie, accidentally mangle/remove/destroy).
It actually doesn't work right, and MS just closed the issue. I'd be fine with cifs automounts in the linux subsystem for windows file directories... I mean it may take a little work, but in the end, I want to edit files with a windows gui editor, and run them via the LSW applications. Until I can do that, it's an also ran on the desktop... and until it can be used for docker with linux containers on the server, it doesn't do much use there either.
Why can't you keep the shared files that you want to GUI edit somewhere under /mnt/?/* in a normal NTFS folder? That works fine already today.
I'm using Bash on Ubuntu on Windows for Jekyll (because installing and keeping up to date Ruby on Windows is a terrible experience and this is a much nicer alternative). My files are in D:\Repos\..., I'll have VSCode open and Jekyll running in Bash in the equivalent /mnt/d/Repos/...
