[joezydeco]

Having just recently spent probably in excess of 100 hours on an embedded systems project at university, I'm starting to get a bit annoyed with using embedded C.

You many want to reconsider your career path, then. Because I've been working on embedded systems for a long time now and it's always been embedded C. And it's looking like it's going to be that way for a long time to come. If you're using a kernel like Linux or FreeRTOS, even moreso.

The entire project is just a massive mess of cascading makefiles and #defines, and is amazingly poorly documented.

Again, welcome to embedded systems engineering. Enjoy your stay.