Hi @SNitaine! We’ve been hard at work trying to decouple Processing core from the editor and make everything a bit more modular. As of now that work is not yet ready though!
So far we have the following:
We have core published to maven central as a standard Java library.
We have the Visual Studio Code plugin
As for distributing processing-java as a standalone, if you look under the hood of that binary you will see that is just a wrapper around running the PDE binary with some extra arguments, so a decoupling is unlikely there.