The light (free) edition of JCreator lacks code completion, JDK debugger, and refactoring tools though, which are huge time savers.

Beginner is expected/supposed to learn befor he should get some help with code completition. Many of students at my university failed subject because for once they been using NetBeans at university pc's but couldn't get them running at home/laptops (I will not comment on that). Secondly most labs been done on Unix system with instalation of Java on it.
Personaly I prefer to do it the way as I do, because I'm in charge of coding (hopefully), I have certain habbits while writing and I do not want IDE to automaticaly closing bracklets, providing code completition, trashing my hardisk with tons of new un-necessary folder structors and do other silly things.

That's understandable for learning and is ok for small projects of a few files. Once you start hammering code all day, every day, on a project that comprises several hundred class files though, code completion, jdk debugger, and refactoring become immensely productive

I think that it's safe to assume that since this guy hasn't even found an IDE yet, he's not going to be working on projects that comprise several hundred class files without spending serious time learning.