Agree with everything you said. To expand on this:
> Speaking for myself, I avoided Arduino in the early years because I didn't want to step out of my lane etc.
Personally the reason I've avoided Arduino is the absolute pain in the butt that it used to be to get it connected to a network. Almost everything I build benefits from some sort of connectivity, and the Arduino was only really good for things that were purely offline. Even before the Pis had wifi, they had ethernet and I could just plug them in.
And now that ESP32 exists there's no reason to buy the wifi-enabled arduinos they now make, at 8x the price.
> Speaking for myself, I avoided Arduino in the early years because I didn't want to step out of my lane etc.
Personally the reason I've avoided Arduino is the absolute pain in the butt that it used to be to get it connected to a network. Almost everything I build benefits from some sort of connectivity, and the Arduino was only really good for things that were purely offline. Even before the Pis had wifi, they had ethernet and I could just plug them in.
And now that ESP32 exists there's no reason to buy the wifi-enabled arduinos they now make, at 8x the price.