pert:
I think the article I posted was actually a decent example of what you were talking about in your writeup. It starts out as an anti-Arduino rant, but in the end it underscores many of the strengths of Arduino, most prominently that "There is no Arduino language".The author complains about how slow digitalWrite() is but then explains that you're not forced to use it when speed matters. I had posted some links in the comments showing efforts that had been made to improve the performance of digitalWrite() and the reasons why they weren't accepted by the developers and after looking at them the author softened his stance a bit.
He also knocks the EEPROM library but it sounds like he was thinking of the old EEPROM library from a couple of years ago instead of v2.0, which does offer some added functionality over the standard avr-libc EEPROM library. That's a common problem I see with Arduino haters. They're basing their statements on their experiences with the Arduino IDE years ago. This does make some sense because why should they keep up to date on a program they hate, but there has been a lot of progress and will continue to be.
Good stuff!!! I added more to your karma. Your impressions about the article you linked are the same as mine :). I think later I'll put on my forum (which has raspberry pi as well as arduino readers) the information about just how close it is to C, and how C can be added.
Out of curiosity, without looking deeply at the library could you summarize why digitalWrite() has to be 28x slower? That seems quite a lot, even if there are a few branches. There must be a delay in there, right? if so, why?