I live in the middle. For quickie little projects like my NMEA protocol converter, the Arduino tools &amp; IDE are fine, if barely adequate as the project has grown.<p>However, I have another project where Atmel Studio is a better choice. So I import all the Arduino libraries I need (there&#x27;s a plugin that can do this automatically, but it&#x27;s buggy), and then just build it as a regular C++ project but I get &quot;free&quot; use of the libraries without the crappy Arduino IDE.<p>The nice thing about Arduino is it&#x27;s so popular that the economies of scale let me buy hardware cheaper than I could build it myself and pretty much all the libraries I need are already written. Although I have had to debug a few of them!! The bad thing is their terrible interface that&#x27;s really made for tiny programs only.