I love me some Arduino.
I have several. I build pretty much every project around them. Even when I’m building a circuit that doesn’t use the microcontroller at all, it’s very convenient to have a regulated 5V USB power supply (and of course a mini breadboard sitting on a Protoshield with lots of access to the 5V).
I understand that the Arduino is, at the same time, extreme overkill for some projects (I can make blinky LEDs without a uC, thank you), yet extremely underpowered for others (hey, it’s only 16MHz, with a paltry amount of RAM, and I’m forever running low on I/O pins). There are other options out there. Cheap ones. I could make something more powerful for less money, probably.
Frankly, I could care less about that.
If I had a project that required more horsepower than an Arduino, I’d figure out what I needed, and then upgrade. But my projects haven’t demanded that yet.
If I wanted to produce units in bulk, and I was worried about the $30 price tag for each one, I’d figure out how to build a circuit without an Arduino, or at least without an off-the-shelf one.
For the bulk of what I do, however, the Arduino affords me the ability to simply create, without a lot of extra baggage. Need to read some sensors? No problem. Need to drive a motor or two? No problem. Need some buttons/switches/LCD for user input? No problem. I can spend more time thinking about solving problems, and less time thinking about filtering capacitors and voltage regulators.
I am a professional software developer. The code both doesn’t scare me, and is powerful enough to do what I want. I’m sure that it’s limited in one way or another, but I haven’t had to care, because I’m not looking for edge cases. I’m trying to solve problems.
I have tried PIC, and found that using a PIC chip made my project *more* difficult, because I had to wrestle the PICkit, the MCU, the breadboard, and the code, before I could even begin to think about the problem I was trying to solve. I was able to take my most complicated PIC project, 1200 lines of PIC C converted into 800 lines of hand-crafted PIC Assembly, a project that took a month to complete; and recreate it in a weekend on an Arduino, with about 100 lines of Arduino C code.
There are a lot of people out there who came to Arduino out of a desire to create something, who don’t have an EE or CS background. For every one of those people who was able to do something with Arduino they’d otherwise be unable to, the Arduino is a huge win.
For the people who can’t understand that this is valuable, please, just move on.
For everyone else, welcome. Show me what you’ve made.