Joe (and Bruce):
I have never been accused of being diplomatic but I didn't mean to be offensive either. The original post was so full of misunderstandings / misconceptions that I really didn't know where to start as far as a reply was concerned. I felt that 'cr0sh' did a good job explaining many of my concerns and that is what I meant to get across.
I would like to address what you mentioned in Reply #7 since no one else has.
I'm looking more for a single DIP IC that I can program and play around with, and then solder the IC into a PCB with whatever else is required for the project and be able to go back and program it, in-curcuit (ICSP), not a platform like the Arduino Board or Freeduino. -Joe
There is nothing about the Arduino that does not meet this criteria. I know that some of the current UNO boards are using surface mount chips but this is supposedly a temporary matter. The Arduino board and most of it's compatible relatives have a six pin ISP (ICSP) programming header. If worse comes to worse you could always develop your program using one of the surface mount Arduino units and then program the debugged hex file into a DIP package using the ISP header. (see below).
I think you may be calling the Arduino and the Freeduino a 'platform' because they both include the USB interface. Several of the software compatible boards, the Bare Bones Board, the Boarduino and the Sippino for example, do not contain this interface which usually is extraneous after you have your program debugged. All of these boards do have the ISP header and they are inexpensive enough to be considered in place of a board that you design and have built yourself.
Any of these boards along with an external programmer such as the AVRISPMK2 and the free AVR Studio 4 IDE, provide a means to program the ATMega328 in either C or assembly language. You can always reload the bootloader via the ISP and use the Arduino IDE if you want. I frequently bounce back and forth.
Don