[peteforde]

It's not a question of "unnecessary". You just don't like it when someone points out that you're making shallow statements and you don't even realize it.

When you frame two MCUs intended for different purposes as competition, you're completely missing why there are so many different useful MCU families in the first place.

If you need a programmable IO state machine (or twelve) then you need the RP2350, period. It's a feature that enables entire domains of functionality that wouldn't otherwise be possible. For example, I'm using it to perform a real-time 12 output MIDI THRU that doesn't tax the CPU cores. Nothing like that exists on the ESP32 family.