Experts tend to greatly underestimate the importance of friction.
By the time you’ve finished saying “gcc and a custom toolchain” you’ve lost most of your potential audience. If you’re a professional or even an experienced hobbyist, it’s no big deal. But if the idea of programming embedded systems is new to you, it’s a lot of effort. And it’s not clear how much effort it will be, or if you’ll even be capable of it. It’s not fun to be knee deep in a complicated install and have no idea if you’ll ever be able to get it working. Lots of people will find something else to occupy their time rather than attempt it.
That then leads to community and better tools, and maybe it becomes a good choice even for experts. And even if it never does, it provides a great stepping stone, since trying and failing to set up the more complicated tools is a lot more tolerable if you can fall back to the simple IDE you’ve been using.
By the time you’ve finished saying “gcc and a custom toolchain” you’ve lost most of your potential audience. If you’re a professional or even an experienced hobbyist, it’s no big deal. But if the idea of programming embedded systems is new to you, it’s a lot of effort. And it’s not clear how much effort it will be, or if you’ll even be capable of it. It’s not fun to be knee deep in a complicated install and have no idea if you’ll ever be able to get it working. Lots of people will find something else to occupy their time rather than attempt it.
That then leads to community and better tools, and maybe it becomes a good choice even for experts. And even if it never does, it provides a great stepping stone, since trying and failing to set up the more complicated tools is a lot more tolerable if you can fall back to the simple IDE you’ve been using.