I think the beauty and genius of Arduino was how much more accessible that project made microcontroller development for great many people. As a pro-SWE and dabb

I think the beauty and genius of Arduino was how much more accessible that project made microcontroller development for great many people. As a pro-SWE and dabbling electronics person, I had bounced off the PIC and other toolchains, sometimes managing to get a simple 8051 project working. Then Arduino came along and it was like a light switch was turned on. (Witness how many professional AVR programmers were up in arms over the vast eternal September that suddenly flooded the area. :D ) The IDE tooling is terrible/frustrating for pros in many ways, but "it just works" in some other very important ways. You can get to hello-world (blink an LED) in under 5 minutes. That's huge and appears to be more of what Arduino is targeting.