Every time I have to crack open the books on Intel's x86 ISA I remember why I use a NanoPi Duo (albeit with an I/O extender) as my main workstation for embedded development at home.
My home PC runs hot and isn't particularly suited to testing embedded systems (lacking native SPI, I2C, and even UART ports). The NanoPi Duo rarely exceeds 40°C, is amply fast for the compilation I do, has native pins for UART, SPI, and I2C, and has compiler listings I can read and understand without headache.
… narrow line between "dumbed down" and "painfully prone to hard-to-diagnose hardware problems". A picture of an actual board I own (an older one for the ESP8266) shows what I mean.
THIS is what I think an "Arduino Done Right" should look like.
Of course this leads to the issue of software. There are three things to deal with here:
1. Software for beginners.
2. Software for experts.
3. Bypassing the default software entirely.
Beginners should be faced with a high level language …
Embedded systems developer. (Real embedded systems, not PCs with a funky form factor running Linux.) Married. Child. And that's the extent of personal life sharing that's happening here.