Absolutely. I see nothing but benefits from having both options (incidentally was thinking PIC due to power requirements) for a project. But the "hmmm" thought

Absolutely. I see nothing but benefits from having both options (incidentally was thinking PIC due to power requirements) for a project. But the "hmmm" thought was about complexity of a system as time goes on. Was imagining dozens of unpatched Linux-based devices put on top of other dozens of devices in a system and the maintenance aspect took on a new tone. It's like you can send an email with a single line of PHP code, which turns into 673 lines of system calls, which turns into thousands of assembly instructions and that's not even counting what happens after it's passed to a mailer - and at some point the complexity of being able to account for every action of a part becomes untenable.