I might get shunned for this but one of the major draws to the arduino for me was the removable chip (and the easy language)
But if I limit myself to a smd chip that's attached to a board forever I prefer my ubw32 which is a 40$ 80mhz pic32 setup (with even more pins, barley)
the microchip ide is not too bad, there is a fair amount of examples and If I get scared I can run stick os on it (which is a real time multitasking basic, tho I am still waiting for usb host support on that)