You and me both on an 812! And using the 1614 as a general purpose part, they're definitely my go-to now. Did you know they almost made a 3214? Headers for it were in the ATpack, but then got removed this year. I don't suppose you have an idea of which libraries work with megaTinyCore do you? Or more importantly, which ones *don't*. Hit me in the DM's if so, there are some freebies in it for you if you've got a substantial list. ;-) This goes for everyone, by the way. I don't get to work on my own projects anymore so haven't been using libraries much, see....
They also may not be doing an ATtiny422 either! (2-series is coming out, they say around thanksgiving, first datasheet dropped in july, and it shows the whole family - and no 8-pin parts - I'm *thankful* for 2 more months before I have to have the ADC code written; that ADC is another animal, for sure. They also gave us a second USART, which is pretty sweet, though they took away the second ADC (payment for the new ADC :-P) and the TCD (okay, nobody used it anyway - but it sure makes competition tighter for the remaining timers, since you can't offload millis to TCD, which is the default because that thing is a bitch to configure correctly). Besides those big ones, not much has changed other than an extra two CCL LUTs and the ability to make TCBs count on events and cascade input capture if you so desire. Oh, and we get a 32k 14-pin part, and the 32k parts have 3k of ram (not 2k), 32/16k parts get 256 of eeprom, 4/8 get 128b. They can use an external high frequency crystal as clock source, like the Dx series. Sadly the cpu core isn't the Dx one, so it still has the same frequency limits, and the same 16/20 oscillator scheme.
Oh... and they can be fused to use a different pin as reset so you don't need to use HV programming to get hardware reset!
8-pin parts could just be a different datasheet and later release though, because the pinout has to differ more because of the small number of pins... or maybe they don't think it's worth it? There are definitely some things I'd love a dual USART 8-pin part for, though...
It looks to me like they didnt decide they hated external crystals, they just took their sweet time getting a new HF external oscillator peripheral ready (everything announced since this spring has had it - and my god are they announcing a lot of new parts; I suspect they were waiting on the 12-bit ADC enhancement that the Dx series has (though they don't have the crazy one) and/or the crystal peripheral to release a huge refresh of the AVR line).
You'll like the DD-series too (but who doesn't like DDs? *corny laugh track*) they go 14/20/28/32 pins, 16/32/64k flash with 2/4/8k ram and 256b eeprom, ADC on every pin 3 (or 4 on 28/32-pin) pins with MVIO (no ADC on those pins if MVIO is in use, obviously), Dx-style clock generation, we get TCD, and 28/32k parts have a third TCB. Oh, and the 20-pin ones come in soic-20 or VQFN, but not the 3x3mm one that the tinyAVR 20-pin ones come in, which can be massaged into a 20-pin DIP outline - those are coming to my shop for the 1616 in october btw - but the 28 pin ones will be in DIP package too, so who cares?). Oh, and dedicated reset pin, but both reset and UPDI can be fused to GPIO, though one of them is input only like usual on Dx? Can't be certain about that. Product brief is out, but that's it, so who knows when we will see it, probably 2021.