There are many similar tools compared to WED. The Torque users have Constructor to create this kind of block geometry and calculate static shadows.
Torque 3D got a new "sketch" tool to draw 3d geometry.

In C4 you also can build primitives in the level editor, change mapping and add materials to them. The demo level is mainly build with the help of these.

And then there are tons of map-creating tools.

Regarding shaders:
This is the wrong approach to not include shaders to support older machines. C4, Unity, Torque 3D and other engines use a way to render on older machines with a downgraded version of the shader set. And you even dont have to care, you put in your diffuse texture, your normal and spec texture and the system will decide how or if they will be used on the machine of your customer.
The Source engine (Half Life 2) even has branches for different DirectX versions.

I agree with you, that a developer should not care about shaders. We should not be forced to write shaders for each situation (1 light, 2 lights, with or without lightmap, with or without fog, with or without environment map, with or without emission map, parallax etc.). This should be generated by an intelligent shader system in the background.

And this is how C4, Unity, T3D and others work. You just plugin your textures and change some properties and the shader will be created and will run, no matter what platform you are running on.