Hi Ray,
You're absolutely right on 2 counts (at least):
1. The community is often the most important component for getting a project working! It was/is true of the PicAxe forum and its true here.
2. Simpler is often better for the hobbyist. That's why Arduino has been successful. When the hobbyist outgrows the 8-bit AVRs, the need is often simply for more speed, ram and/or flash.
Megas, Bobuinos and the like only really provide 2 of those 3. The 16 (or 20) MHz limit, combined with 8-bit architecture, can become the next bottleneck.
Having said that, and before anyone else comments, I expect 4 out of 5 Arduino users hit those limits because of inefficiencies in their own sketch. Learning to make better use of those limited resources is where they should probably focus, rather than immediately reaching for more powerful hardware, because that will only result in their sketch becoming even more inefficient!
You probably remember my fascination with Conway's Game of Life. I would still like to adapt my algorithm for a larger matrix. For that I would need more ram. Currently it maxes out the ram on a mega328 processing a 128x64 matrix. A Mega644/1284 would allow that, but to keep up the speed on that larger matrix, I would need more processing speed too. So that's one thing I would like to try out on this ARM-thing one day.