In case this is a factor at all:
I've found the stm32f103 micro easiest to work with simply because of the bluepill boards that you can find floating around on Ebay or Ali Express.
They are cheap enough that you don't mind destroying them with a bad design when you want to iterate; powerful enough that you can do most things, integrate a couple of ADCs; has the standard UART, SPI, I2C hardware, can do PWM and GPIO stuff without too much headache and has a USB COM port.
If it had a DAC integrated on those boards they would be perfect, but you don't always need that functionality.
I am considering making my own dev board using a different version of the stm32f103 micro which also includes the DAC just to use for quick prototyping, because of the easy route I had to learning the bluepill with the stm32f103c8t6.
EDIT: forgot to add that the cheap programmer also had an impact on why I chose to start with the STM line
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Your post reads like a sales advert!
The STM32F103 isn't really a modern candidate for someone getting into STM Micros because it's a OLD chip, in fact the first 32 bit ARM by STM in 2011.
This chip lacks more than a DAC:-
Some STM32F103 Limitations
CAN Bus Shares memory with the USB hardware, which means that USB and CAN cannot be enabled at the same time
Serial Comms No Autobaud
The famous $3 'Blue Pill' was indeed a great way for the Chinese sellers to get the MCU for almost nothing, even if it was scraped from a e-waste by some guy with a blowtorch. The quality sucks, some don't even have the original STM32F103 but come with the GigaDevices Cortex M3 “GD32F130xx” (64KB Flash MAX) clone.
You get what you pay for.
Then you have 'cheap programmers' some of which that don't implement ST-Link properly.
I say cut the pain, make your time count and buy a new STM Nucleo or discovery board with the latest feature packed STM32L073 chip, a programmer is included for free, they aren't expensive, I paid $20 AUD for mine. That way you will be learning the latest tech, not old tech.
And it's guaranteed to work, unlike that $3 'Blue Pill'.