> Again, I think you've lost sight of just how difficult some of this stuff is from the perspective of someone who has no or only passing familiarity with it.

> Again, I think you've lost sight of just how difficult some of this stuff is from the perspective of someone who has no or only passing familiarity with it. Let me restate that I help run a makerspace (minor asterisk, it has been in hibernation for several months for COVID). In practice, that looks like people with no prior experience wanting to make an embedded system (not in those words, obviously), 3-d print something, or just see what we're about. We tend to start people in the first group on ESPs, and they seem happy/successful. The second group more-or-less randomly ends up on OpenSCAD or FreeCAD depending on who they talk to, and has a fairly low success rate. My impression of the Arduino IDE experience, when targeting one of the many available 32-bit boards, is that it's just as good as targeting AVR. There should be enough abstraction in the right places, so that a driver for an LCD or whatever will work just as well on either architecture. There might be one additional step to install the extension to use Adafruit boards for instance. Are there a lot of people in the community struggling with 32-bit systems, doing things that just work on the AVR ones? From what I've seen, struggles with these small ARM systems, are usually either people starting from closer-to-metal (and the micro is, obviously, more complicated than an 8-bit AVR), or people working on problems that are just bigger than would be appropriate to solve on an AVR to begin with. I'm familiar with the forums, blogs, etc. and I can accept there's more beginner-oriented material for AVR. However, that does not say that the material for more modern parts is insufficient - either in the Arduino world or outside of it. For the most part, the material people use when learning isn't (or doesn't need to be) architecture specific.