I've been playing the ard / esp / Rpi universe for awhile now, and it just continues to blow me away how cheap AND easy it is to build working, useful things with these tools. It still helps to really know what's going on under the hood, but even that's not a hard requirement, apparently. The new platform plugin feature in the Ard IDE is a major step forward, too.
If the Ard IDE people:
- handled multi-file dependencies intelligently (rather than recompile everything in the sketch, every time)
- added a reasonable text editor perhaps as a plugin (as an option)
- added some git integration (as an option)
- added some debug integration
then I think they could honestly take over a lot of "professional" development environments, whose main claim to professionalness is that they are huge, bloated, complex, and in general a PITA to get up and running. Sure, very large, complex projects maybe will never be Ard-friendly, but for me, I do a lot of embedded stuff in the 5-15 source files comprising the 200 - 5000 lines of code, and I can live with Arduino.
People correctly point out that a lot of the Ard libs are pretty crappy, but they are reasonable training wheels, and you don't have to use them.
I'm a fan.