A while back I tried out Espressif's esp32 and I was impressed by what they were offering. Their devices seem to be well documented and the esp-idf framework is really pleasant to use. It's much easier to work with than STM32Cube and ST's sprawling documentation.

How do you upsell a hardware engineer who just wants to buy a specific chip, and already has everything to evaluate and use it? You don't. So you force everyone to go through sales, and then sales wants to talk to non-engineering higher-ups, and then the upsell happens - while the people who actually knew what they wanted remain as far away as possible.

And if you don't have the pockets deep enough for the sales dept to acknowledge your existence, then you might as well not exist.

I liked working with Microchip uC, but this was back when the whole IC (PIC24) was described in a single ~1000 page document. I found it very readable and instructive in general.

If I had to pick something today it would be with RP2040/2350. The docs look awesome and there's a huge community that is not locked down in some corporate moderated forum but spread organically, with actually useful GitHub projects. It is the only embedded product where it felt like the open source community is along for the ride and not just picking up the scraps. I hope they continue this line of products.

    - you can charge money for things
    - anything that's not built with the "official compiler" is not "supported"

They used ARM chips, so not even anything strange...

The real issue would come if they did not provide the source code for the gcc build they sell you, though.