I'm a novice when it comes to Arduinos and stuff, but I second your suggestion for using the avrgcc toolchain instead of the Arduino IDE. I tinker with Arduino

I'm a novice when it comes to Arduinos and stuff, but I second your suggestion for using the avrgcc toolchain instead of the Arduino IDE. I tinker with Arduinos and Arduino-likes that have the atmega32u4 chip with built-in USB controller, write the firmware in C with the LUFA library providing USB support, avrgcc to compile, and avrdude or dfu-programmer to flash.