I left out the ARMs since they appear to be a bit on the expensive side (the ones I'm looking at cost about $4 in not so large quantities), and the ones I looke

I left out the ARMs since they appear to be a bit on the expensive side (the ones I'm looking at cost about $4 in not so large quantities), and the ones I looked at didn't have much in the way of UARTs, ADC and IOs. I'll have another look though; I found some cheaper ones with a quick search on digikey. As for the 8051 family, that's what I've been working with in the last two projects - and I'd like to find a better alternative. Both in terms of hardware (the number of page selectors needed to cram all those registers into 128/255 bytes of address space is just wrong) and software (I've used IAR and Keil, and neither feels like it's evolved too much since 2002).