That's fair. To me, the reliability exploits the hobbyist's inexperience; they don't know how short a edit/test cycle should be, so they aren't upset by how lo

That's fair. To me, the reliability exploits the hobbyist's inexperience; they don't know how short a edit/test cycle should be, so they aren't upset by how long it is. "Hardware is hard," they're told. As other comments mention, the real innovation is not making them flash firmware at all -- things like Circuit Python have worked very well for me, and you can point your editor at a Python file right on the device itself and it starts running from the top when you save. That is probably the ideal situation; nevermind how inefficient it is compared to C++ (people can learn C++ once they understand the basics of programming; no need to start there). I'll also point out that Amazon has STM32 kits; $18 gets you 2 STM32F103s and a programmer. I have used those and they are probably my favorite microcontroller platform and the price sure is good. There is no doubt about which programmer to use because it's in the box, and the programmer is so cheap that buying one (and a backup microcontroller) is cheaper than most hobbyist MCU boards. ("Made in Italy" ends up being quite a bit pricier than "made in China probably from a grey-market chip".)