Yeah. I recommend the atxmegas mainly cause they just are so super nice to use.
They lost a lot of good will over the introduction of those controllers.
For a long time the xmegeas were not available at all, while Atmel was lying through their teeth and marketing them as available and buying themselves awards for those non-existing MCUs. Then the disastrous silicon errors when they were finally available. Accompanied with a new disastrous IDE, a disastrous library, and expensive new programmers required.
Many of the originally announced xmegas never shipped. Leaving people in the cold who trusted Atmel and started development on a smaller xmega or one missing a critical feature, believing they could soon get the right one.
Worst of all, Atmel refused to acknowledge the problems and to talk about them. The xmega disaster was what ultimately drove us away from Atmel. They lost all our trust.
Wow, your story mirrors mine almost exactly.
We were asked by a customer to develop a new product - an industrial tachometer, to be shown off in 6 months at an important industry trade show. I was looking at Atmel's website and saw the much hyped XMega. After talking with our FAE, he couldn't stop raving about how amazing the chip was and how it would be so easy to use, blah blah. He assured me I could get samples immediately and lead time on reels would be 4-6 weeks or less... and that they were in mass production now, but the chip was soooo popular that they had a huge backlog of orders.
So we designed the chip into our product. I distinctly remember that our samples were so delayed that I ended up buying a couple of eval boards from eBay (Atmel had given them away at some event and many ended up on eBay) and desoldering the chips from them to get some prototypes working. And after pulling our hair out trying to get the project working, there was some bug in the ADC (don't recall the specifics this long after) that just made it non-working at all in our application. Various folks at Atmel *promised* to high heaven that it was fixed in production silicon that would be available in mere weeks.
They never showed. Ever. We ended up cobbling together a totally hacked "prototype" of that product for the show that consisted of a Cypress dev board under the desk and a huge ribbon cable hacked onto the LED display of the product.
I distinctly remember getting the call from someone @ Atmel to let me know my samples had shipped - we had already scrapped the XMega idea and scrapped Atmel alltogether... and it was well over a YEAR from when we were first told that we could get a reel within a few weeks.
By that point, I had designed any Atmel chips out of any products that were in development, and since then we've designed them out of every product when we came up on redesigns. Just like with you - Atmel just totally lost our trust.
That was not the only incident, but it was one of a few and it was by far the biggest. I remember sitting in a large room filled with electronic design engineers getting a presentation from Atmel about some chip with built-in LCD control. They had a slide with a BOM and costs... it had this $14 chip listed as "Less than $1". When he got to that line, the room literally erupted in laughter. The nordic guy giving the presentation got flustered and defensive at this and tried to sternly correct the audience that this was realistic pricing - which pissed off a few audience members who then took him to task on it. He later admitted that this price was a special deal negotiated for one customer as a chip-on-board version in million-per-month quantities. Everyone was laughing and guffawing at the excuses this guy was making about how these new chips were money savers and how they were going to be around to stay.
I realized that I wasn't the only victim of Atmel's pricing/availability/life-span business tactics. A real eye-opener. Not to mention the stack of ridiculous junk I spent a few grand on - STK600's with ridiculous adapters for various chips - Dragon's that had some flaw that caused them to burn out with regularity, and ISP programmers that died regularly (got a box full of dead versions of those). Just crap, crap, crap.