I generally agree on the simple, common approach being a great draw for Arduino and its related education. I was going through school around the time when arudino took off. IMO, older vendor toolchains were just painful by comparison. Licensed compilers ($$ license), janky IDEs that were death by 1000 cuts, having to learn different port masks (etc) for initializing different microcontrollers, IO libraries for each microcontroller, proprietary programmers (devices to load compiled software to the microcontroller). IMO, this is where FPGAs are largely still stuck in nowadays.
Though it probably wasn't all that bad. My experiences with the bad side of things largely stems from the PIC lineup. I still have trusted configurations of MPLAB + C Compiler that work vs others I just could never get working. Still have the PIC programmer. Some earlier arm tooling (armv6 era) was quite like this, too. Luckily, it has all opened up quite a bit. Either arudino-level ease of use or even drag and drop. The latter did exist in the armv6 era, since I have a Freescale Kinetis that operates like that, minus the simple IDE & compiler of the arduinos.
Simple IDE also means simple install, operation, and licensing to me. There may be a great paid IDE for the Kinetis, but the moment I have to start juggling more logins, node/floating license files, web-only environments, etc, I just remember it as time wasted on superfluous nonsense.
For me these days I value "Time to hello world" over many other things which is why I would rather use PlatformIO when I'm using a platform & framework it supports even if its lagging slightly behind the latest framework version from the vendor directly.
But looking back, back in the day when we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to compile and write (get off mah lawn! :-P) I'm grateful I did learn "how the glue was made" instead of just using something ready made. But older grumpier me just wants to get shit done so I'm happy those days are pretty much behind me, but I'm ready to dust them off again if it was really needed.
I generally agree on the simple, common approach being a great draw for Arduino and its related education. I was going through school around the time when arudino took off. IMO, older vendor toolchains were just painful by comparison. Licensed compilers ($$ license), janky IDEs that were death by 1000 cuts, having to learn different port masks (etc) for initializing different microcontrollers, IO libraries for each microcontroller, proprietary programmers (devices to load compiled software to the microcontroller). IMO, this is where FPGAs are largely still stuck in nowadays.
Though it probably wasn't all that bad. My experiences with the bad side of things largely stems from the PIC lineup. I still have trusted configurations of MPLAB + C Compiler that work vs others I just could never get working. Still have the PIC programmer. Some earlier arm tooling (armv6 era) was quite like this, too. Luckily, it has all opened up quite a bit. Either arudino-level ease of use or even drag and drop. The latter did exist in the armv6 era, since I have a Freescale Kinetis that operates like that, minus the simple IDE & compiler of the arduinos.
Simple IDE also means simple install, operation, and licensing to me. There may be a great paid IDE for the Kinetis, but the moment I have to start juggling more logins, node/floating license files, web-only environments, etc, I just remember it as time wasted on superfluous nonsense.