focalist:
If I were to use a bootloader, there would be a boot wait while waiting for a signal on the serial port.. without a bootloader, it runs immediately without any of that delay- another consideration.
Well, that isn't entirely true - I've been using a variant of optiboot that only pauses after a reset, on cold boot it starts immediately. It's weird going back to my stock Arduino and re-discovering the cold boot delay. But it is nice flashing my in-circuit ATtiny85 projects just by hitting the upload button and having it start immediately after flashing.
Now that the ATMEGA prices are reaching such low points, I'll be building all sorts of nonsense.. and not bothering to make reusable shields when the headers are more expensive than just committing a whole MCU to a build..
You're telling me - I was recently tempted by an auction of ATmega8's on eBay that was on the close order of a buck a chip delivered. That's cheaper than I'm getting ATtiny85's! More GPIO, same flash and memory, same basic level of avr-gcc support, the only thing that stopped me was my overflowing bin of parts I've accumulated.