> I hope you can now see the problem space is not that similar to desktop software, although the conventional software world does have a lot it could further contribute to electronics. As usual for those outside of an area, the perceived simplicity of established solutions belies the complexity, nuance and outright effectiveness of their current, if ugly, state.

Outright effectiveness? The industry is an outright disaster and it's a wonder engineers can get anything done outside of well-funded businesses. A small but representative slice of some of the bullshit I've had to deal with since I started designing electronics (high speed digital and RF):

Meta build systems with pre-pre-processors with feature gates for bug fixes tied to CRMs so that clients don't receive fixes unless they first encounter the bug (and waste weeks trying to fix it while their account manager responds). NDAs on all of the interesting parts with 2+ weeks turn around time on paperwork and 2+ months on samples (but if you're in Shenzhen you can just grab it at the corner store...). Mismatched peripheral IP jammed together with half-assed drivers that wouldn't pass at a client tech demo (can you run both DMA channels at the same time on STM32Fx or does that still crash?). Buggy reference implementations of basic interconnects that silently drop data and don't support run of the mill "advanced" features used in every ARM mcu (thank you, Xilinx). Version control brought to you by WinRar, 7Zip, and IMAP. Data exchange brought to you by The Interns™ because who has time for that shit. Different versions of firmware written by two completely different Qualcomm teams firewalled away from each other for the same chip, in the same market deployed to clients depending on whether they had an existing relationship with Broadcom or not.

The worst part is that none of these problems have much to do with the actual hardware! If it weren't for the culture surrounding the industry, electrical engineering itself would be an absolute pleasure. It has never been easier to slap a schematic and PCB layout together in Altium if you already know what you need, especially with sites like SnapEDA and Octopart simplifying the boring parts (notably, both cofounded by teams with a lot more mainstream software ecosystem experience). It's just getting to that point and writing the firmware afterwards is absolutely awful. I had a similar situation to your MCU example not too long ago and I ended up going with Atmega because downloading a bunch of Arduino projects and looking at firmware in practices makes characterizing a platform and making the right early decisions a lot easier.

To be clear: I couldn't care less about the compile times or higher level abstractions or any of the tech fads that roll through HN (although I am very much hyped up for Rust and now work with React at my day job). I just want a basic culture of information sharing and cooperative common sense that we take for granted. Coming from a software engineering background, the only thing I think this industry has done right is reference designs and PCB layout notes.

I get that the industry isn't a homogeneous blob and most of these problems are a result of the vendors' mismatching economic incentives but that just means that the industry is a natural disaster. All of these problems suck everyone into a feedback loop preventing any real progress, especially when all the details of hardware and software are locked away.