Thanks for confirming my own impression. The Arduino dev environment is pretty meh, I used it once when I was building a test rig and found it painful, but it I

Thanks for confirming my own impression. The Arduino dev environment is pretty meh, I used it once when I was building a test rig and found it painful, but it IS easy for a beginner. If you don't like it, just use VSCode / PlatformIO. Also, as for the Arduino HAL, what a REAL embedded dev would do is implement their own platform-agnostic library and then implement it on every microcontroller they use and... oh wait they've just reimplemented the HAL. But basically there's nothing about Arduino that makes it magically always bad. Start with your requirements spec. If a piece of hardware meets those requirements, and it's cheaper than the other options, use it. Even if it's Arduino.