[com2kid]

> I can assure you there are plenty of old school engineers that can get an MCU to run for months on a couple AA batteries. They're not spinning a 20MHz CPU in a busy-loop most of the time.

Oh sure, the good ones aren't, but I've met more than one who thinks spinning is A-OK, especially if they haven't done battery powered stuff before!

As an example, we had a heck of a time finding a non-blocking power loss resistant file system. Ending up having to write our own. (Not an easy choice, a lot of vendors were talked to) We went to the traditional embedded file vendors at the time (hopefully things have changed) and across the board asking for a (NOR) Flash file system that could handle sudden power loss, but without the file system needing any blocking, was met with stares of "why would you want that?"

Of course a lot of embedded works uses interrupts, but on more than one occasion we encountered bugs when doing things "the correct way" and comments from our suppliers that were basically summed up as "well if you weren't so insistent on everything being async..."