Can anyone reccommend one? I'd like to be able to have things like the packaging more automated for me and more/better syntax highlighting for the actual kde portions of it

Plasmate, an IDE designed for Plasmoid development is currently in development, and designed for scripted plasma applets, etc. in particular.

Otherwise you may wish to look at Kate ( which is a syntax highlighting text editor )

ah, I never thought of using kate for this.