[DigitalBison]

This is exactly where I'm at. I'm a professional SDE and I'm pretty damn good at writing code and solving problems at all kinds of different levels of complexity and abstraction, although professionally I mostly write Java code and build web services and that kind of thing.

When I got into electronics and embedded development recently as a hobby, I started with Arduino. And for the vast majority of my projects, which are mostly simple smarthome IOT type things, or little toys for my kiddo, the Arduino framework is just fine and the ecosystem of libraries is great.

But when I recently started a project that was much lower-level (in fact, it was your example exactly -- driving pins with cycle-accurate timing), where I didn't need those libraries, I used ESP-IDF without Arduino.

I'm also just lazy, and just don't want to deal with more complexity than I have to.

[stavros]

How was your experience with ESP-IDF? I've only used Arduino so far (I've basically had exactly the same experience as you), and haven't needed anything more, but I've been thinking of using the IDF for my next project, since I can't use Rust yet.