I believe the big advantage of Arduino is in the tooling and vast quantity of working code samples and projects you can find on the web. While the IDE has its

I believe the big advantage of Arduino is in the tooling and vast quantity of working code samples and projects you can find on the web. While the IDE has its quirks it is easy for newbs getting started, has decent samples bundled in, and works very well with real Arduinos where you just plug the USB cable in and go. I've gone the bare-ATMEGA328P route with an ICSP programmer as well and still value the leverage the IDE gives me to leverage code samples I find on the web.