@Pert, phenomenal review! Exactly what I was looking for, thanks so much Pert. I'll also incorporate the couple of changes that you found.
Robin2:
+1 to @pert.
If people want to use up server capacity on other Fora complaining about the Arduino system that is fine by me. But it's a bit unreasonable to complain about it on this Forum if you are not prepared to make an effort to improve things.
Does it matter if some people dislike the Arduino system? Nobody is forced to use it. Just like nobody is forced to drink Pepsi if they dislike it (Asda (WalMart) Cola is fine, and much cheaper).
So just to be clear, I didn't have any complaints about Arduino at all :). I wanted to show some of this push-back that I've seen against Arduino. I think it's fantastic, and, actually, in my opinion in many cases it is okay to ship Arduino code.
More broadly, the reason for discussing this question there, is because I'm working on a product that is a combined Raspberry Pi/Orange Pi/etc embedded Linux + Arduino subsystem, and although I think this forum is good to discuss it, people here suggested I make my own forum due to the intersection of technologies. So, that's the reason that I have that stuff over at curious.boards.net. By the way, I think what Pert just pointed out about "My theory is that if you can get them to the fun part fast then they will get hooked enough to go back and learn the basics" is such a great observation. I think my goal will be making a completely compatible and Licensed ARM subsystem, that can also be used in production, meaning that someone can begin to tinker, then move on to selling a few hundred units of their prototype - before they have to take the dive into deep embedded microelectronics work. There's absolutely no hate from me on any of this I was attempting to understand the perspective of some professional EE's. By the way, in some of the messages I received personally, it's clear that many professional EE's do use Arduino in prototyping and testing. So in many cases even if Arduino doesn't seem to be in the final product, it's there every step of the way.
They learned this stuff the hard way so everyone else should too. It's threatening to them because microcontrollers are no longer the exclusive province of geeks. I actually think a lot of this technical stuff has been intentionally made more difficult than it needs to be for purposes of job security.
Says it all, really! And this is what Arduino upends :).
Thanks for everyone's thoughts, keep them coming if you have more.