The beauty of using such a simple MCU is that it is very easy to learn how to program it directly... ... and yet Arduino isn't actually teaching people how to

The beauty of using such a simple MCU is that it is very easy to learn how to program it directly... ... and yet Arduino isn't actually teaching people how to do that :( I'm a staunch proponent of using up to date MCUs, which means ARM these days, but I'd be completely on board with still using an ATMega as the default in 2022 for this kind of educational purpose if the point were actually being educational. At least it's not a PIC16F84, I suppose. All the microcontroller books spent a decade teaching literally the lowest end, crappiest, and more expensive PIC in the series because it was the first model with Flash memory, and ignoring everything that came after it. Even those that were backwards compatible for all intents and purposes, and not any harder to incrementally learn.