Life as an amateur is better. Arduino + PlatformIO is plain fun to work with.
As a professional (as in getting paid to do it), I shed being ashamed of using Arduino a while ago. With PlatformIO, you have great tooling and you can avoid the garbage that are the vendor supplied IDEs. And even tough the Arduino HAL isn't exactly elegant, I can switch between uCs without having to learn a new API. I can even port between uCs by simply changing some pin names and so on.
I'm currently looking into other frameworks, like Zephyr, to trade up from Arduino, and I'm especially looking into using Rust in the future (because Rust would give me an actual benefit to offset the cost of using the "harder" language, which will in the long run make stuff easier).
But the ease of use, especially ease of prototyping, of Arduino + PlatformIO is now the baseline.
There is also MicroPython and Espruino - again, stuff that people will make fun of for you using, but you won't care because you will have to much fun using it. Performance and size penalties means they don't work for all problems, but often enough, they do.
There is even working examples for using Swift on uCs - and I really wish that language was better supported under Linux.
There are a lot of great things about Arduino and I agree that there is no reason to be ashamed of it, but the community can be a bit disappointing at times.
I suppose that a lot of people approach the Arduino from the perspective of wanting to create something, yet I am more interested in learning how things work. You can definitely pursue to latter with Arduino. The hurdle I've been running into is a great many people are only interested in using the Arduino libraries, while the few who dive deeper seem to focus upon documenting their projects. Very few people seem to discuss bridging the gap.
Sometimes the most interesting bits lay in that gap. I learned more about microcontrollers by disassembling simple programs and referencing datasheets than from following tutorials or attempting to read the datasheets on their own. You simply cannot do that sort of stuff with the basic Arduino IDE. It hides the details of implementation and of the toolchain. In my case, it took the arduino-cli tools.
None of that is meant to diminish Arduino, MicroPython, or the many other projects that are intended to make life easier. Are they more fun? That depends upon what you're trying to accomplish. I play with this stuff because it brings back memories of the early days of personal computers, so I am more keen on seeing what can be accomplished within tight constraints and shedding away the layers of abstraction. Of course, different people will have different goals and expectations.
The problem with a lot of this solutions is that they won’t hold for complex projects. If all you are doing is turning on some leds and connecting through usb, it works okay.
Try heavily time-sensitive synchronized SPI transfers and going deep into the hardware layout becomes necessary.
One of the things I like doing is taking an Arduino project and rewriting it without using the Arduino libraries, and the benefits go beyond complex problems like timing. It is possible to trim a lot of memory and flash usage if you are tailoring your code to a specific project. The end result is you can do more without purchasing and learning a new microcontroller.
As a professional (as in getting paid to do it), I shed being ashamed of using Arduino a while ago. With PlatformIO, you have great tooling and you can avoid the garbage that are the vendor supplied IDEs. And even tough the Arduino HAL isn't exactly elegant, I can switch between uCs without having to learn a new API. I can even port between uCs by simply changing some pin names and so on.
I'm currently looking into other frameworks, like Zephyr, to trade up from Arduino, and I'm especially looking into using Rust in the future (because Rust would give me an actual benefit to offset the cost of using the "harder" language, which will in the long run make stuff easier).
But the ease of use, especially ease of prototyping, of Arduino + PlatformIO is now the baseline.
There is also MicroPython and Espruino - again, stuff that people will make fun of for you using, but you won't care because you will have to much fun using it. Performance and size penalties means they don't work for all problems, but often enough, they do.
There is even working examples for using Swift on uCs - and I really wish that language was better supported under Linux.