Sounds like a great improvement to me, the 8-bit PICs have great peripherals and are easy to use but the CPU cores are garbage (slow 4T architecture, no hardwar

Sounds like a great improvement to me, the 8-bit PICs have great peripherals and are easy to use but the CPU cores are garbage (slow 4T architecture, no hardware stack, bank switching necessary, forced to use Microchip's proprietary compiler instead of GCC).