What is being coded makes a big difference in development cycles. Most of what I am currently working on are small services that log everything they do anyway

What is being coded makes a big difference in development cycles. Most of what I am currently working on are small services that log everything they do anyway so adding some debugging output to the mix doesn't change much. Where I have seen debuggers being useful at every point in the stack from kernel to compiler to loader and beyond is with ports. If all you are doing is running some existing well understood code on different hardware then being able to poke at the internals when things go wrong can often help find the cause quickly.