For me AVRs stopped to be interesting around the time when Arduino gained popularity, which also caused significant price rise and also availability problems.

For me AVRs stopped to be interesting around the time when Arduino gained popularity, which also caused significant price rise and also availability problems. In 2010 for one-off art project (lot's of MCUs on RS485 controlling LEDs and pushbuttons) we had to switch from ATmega8 to AT89C2051 because it was the only MCU that we could source in time for the event for reasonable price and we had (semi-)reliable programmer capable of programming it (notice the 89C, not 89S). After that I pretty much switched to MSP430 for such things.