My father and I have rather caught the 'maker' bug over the last year or so - starting with an Arduino.
I had no idea it was such a contentious area.
We didn't have much trouble with terminology - such as 'sketch' and 'shield' - being smart cookies it didn't present much in the way of a difficulty. Almost instantly we knew what people were talking about, that a sketch was a programme and a shield was a daughter-board.
If people are dismissing it as a failed platform based on such things I think they are missing the point: It's an easily accessible environment with a huge body of interest and thus, a huge body of work to reference. For a new adopter, this makes getting into it extremely easy.
And there are some immensely talented individuals out there giving up their time and effort to enhance the community.
We started simple - making christmas lights with Arduino Nano's and WS2811s.
Less than a year in and we were designing our own custom PCBs, making cool little toys and (even more cool) potentially marketable devices.
Now, less than 18 months after first placing an order, we are nearly finished on our reflow oven and have a great relationship with a man with $10M worth of SMD components that loves it when we spend money.
Of course there are 'better' MCUs out there - but not being an electronic engineer, I am limited in what I can achieve in the way of designing something that complicated. That being said, I have just finished my first board that includes a discrete Mega328P and our next project is set to utilise a number of large ASICs.
Heck of a lot of fun, and without the Arduino guys, we would still be flying kites and planes and wondering what to do of an evening...