The magic of AVR was that it always had a great, opensource toolkit in the form of avr-gcc and plenty of community support around it. The AVR Freaks forum start

The magic of AVR was that it always had a great, opensource toolkit in the form of avr-gcc and plenty of community support around it. The AVR Freaks forum started well before stack overflow and offered a tremendous volume of support. I do agree about the expensive programmers though. However, there were people out there who wired up their own using the STK200 configuration and put the schematics online for the community's use. Programmers (irrespective of micros) have always been relatively expensive - even the home-brew ones. It's only recently (say in the past 5-8 years) they've become cheaper thanks to people's interest in hobby boards like the Rasberry Pi. The biggest problem was the availability of JTAG debuggers. Atmel had the reference, closed-source implementation. Although the community managed to eventually reverse engineer their implementation and cheaper ones became available on eBay (usually from China).