I suppose if you could tolerate PDIP and were desperate, you could buy
Aruduino Unos, pull the processor, then eventually get new chips, replace
the processor and resell the Unos. Heck, even Amazon carries the unos!
I'm started to avoid Atmel like I avoid Maxim because I just have so much
trouble getting their chips. I kinda wonder if Atmel is even going to be
around in 5 years. I'll bet Microchip will be.
In any case, I've started to see the light. My current designs are
using TI (was Luminary Micro, bought by TI) Cortex ARM chips. They
are generally in stock, cost between $5 and $10 depending on features
and just make concerns about fitting in memory and performance go away.
I'm just not one of those people who enjoys rewriting everything in
assembly just to squeeze a few bytes out.
Yeah, I still plop down PICs into a few things, but I can now put a
$5 ARM chip and a $5 Xilinx FPGA on a board, and those $10 in parts
covers such a huge range of the problems I'm designing for that I'm
losing interest in other chips.
But that's just me, a hobbyist.
Scott