The problem is that it's increasingly hard to get interesting chips in through-hole packages. Pretty much the only stuff Atmel sells now in DIP packages are "le

The problem is that it's increasingly hard to get interesting chips in through-hole packages. Pretty much the only stuff Atmel sells now in DIP packages are "legacy" AVR chips -- if you want something with USB, you've got to go surface mount. As such, the question becomes do you give up on the new and interesting to stick to your roots, or do you give up on some amount of hackability so you can provide interesting things with a gentle learning curve?