I think Arduino is really biting off more than they can chew. Let's look at the recent and upcoming projects:
- Arduino Create: They put a huge amount of work over the course of years into this largely closed source project during which the standard IDE went through a long period of instability and caused a lot of people to have bad experiences.
The projects announced at last year's Maker Faire (which are all excellent ideas that show a lot of vision):
https://groups.google.com/a/arduino.cc/forum/#!searchin/developers/chainsaw/developers/oyt_c5wePg8/_CWGyAG6CQAJ- Project Chainsaw: I haven't seen any work done on this.
- ArduinoAPI: I haven't seen any work done on this.
- Arduino Pre-Processor: There was a lot of work done on this but it still has some serious bugs and I haven't seen much progress recently.
- Arduino Library format: I haven't seen any work done on this.
- Scheduler: I haven't seen any work done on this.
- Debugging: From the Hackaday article it seems maybe there has been work done on this, but it's all been kept private, so the community has had no opportunity to provide assistance or feedback. That makes me suspicious that it's going to be more closed source cloud stuff.
- Arduino Create SBC programming: I haven't noticed this getting barely any use.
New boards announced last week:
- MKR WiFi 1010: Write ESP32 firmware and the interface library.
- MKR NB 1500: Write NB-IoT library.
Now we have this year's announcements:
- MKR Vidor: FPGA seems like a complete tangent that would be an absolutely huge project to do right. It sounds like it's going to be Arduino Create only, which probably means as closed source as they can get away with. They're going to need to write some Arduino libraries for this thing too.
- Uno WiFi: Why the heck would they use the same name as a completely different board that came before it? They need to add ATMega4809 support. The ESP32 support work will be shared with the MKR WiFi 1010.
There's a lot to be said for doing a few things very well. This is especially important for the primary users of Arduino: People who want to get started with microcontrollers without a lot of frustration and steep learning curve. Arduino accomplished that with the AVR boards and I think that's why they were so successful. To do so many new ambitious projects well will require a LOT of money. Where is that going to come from? People can't even buy Arduino boards because they're out of stock. The alternative is to spread limited resources across all these different projects and do none of them well. Better to work on the outstanding projects than add new ones. There are hundreds of valid bug reports and pull requests that get no attention.