There are a lot of great things about Arduino and I agree that there is no reason to be ashamed of it, but the community can be a bit disappointing at times. I

There are a lot of great things about Arduino and I agree that there is no reason to be ashamed of it, but the community can be a bit disappointing at times. I suppose that a lot of people approach the Arduino from the perspective of wanting to create something, yet I am more interested in learning how things work. You can definitely pursue to latter with Arduino. The hurdle I've been running into is a great many people are only interested in using the Arduino libraries, while the few who dive deeper seem to focus upon documenting their projects. Very few people seem to discuss bridging the gap. Sometimes the most interesting bits lay in that gap. I learned more about microcontrollers by disassembling simple programs and referencing datasheets than from following tutorials or attempting to read the datasheets on their own. You simply cannot do that sort of stuff with the basic Arduino IDE. It hides the details of implementation and of the toolchain. In my case, it took the arduino-cli tools. None of that is meant to diminish Arduino, MicroPython, or the many other projects that are intended to make life easier. Are they more fun? That depends upon what you're trying to accomplish. I play with this stuff because it brings back memories of the early days of personal computers, so I am more keen on seeing what can be accomplished within tight constraints and shedding away the layers of abstraction. Of course, different people will have different goals and expectations.