I've developed loads of stuff - "contraptions" - in Arduino, but want to further extend my skill set and learn new stuff.
A few years ago I took the advice of Tim Wilmshurst, who was a colleague of mine and is the author of several books on microcontrollers, and he advised going to ARM mBed. I was never that impressed by the mBed world, for reasons which are probably irrelevant, but I did make one device using it (an audio flanger). Recently ARM announced end-of-life for mBed, which I think is a wise decision.
However, it was a valuable experience; mBed was much more "grown up" than Arduino, and probably more like a professional product, so the experience wasn't wasted.
So, like many people, I am asking myself, "Where next after Arduino?" Yes, I realise this is a frequent question, but the answer changes as time goes by.
Like most people in my position I want an integrated development environment that lets me write, load and debug my code. I want my code to be able to talk directly to the hardware, but also work one layer up from that using a comprehensive set of libraries. I want to be able to write stand-alone programs, and also to write programs that run under a real-time OS such as FreeRTOS. I am up for learning the new skills and disciplines necessary.
Because I'm only an Arduino hacker I realise that the list I've just given is itself incomplete (the bootstrap problem: I don't know enough to know what I want). Feel free to add to it or tear it apart.
At the moment I only have eyes for the Pi Pico 2. This is because it seems to have a very professional and comprehensive infrastructure supporting it. The documentation is thorough and is in native English (not translated). Also, it's a British company so I like the idea of supporting them in my small way. Importantly, the Pico 2 platform is remarkably cheap and is probably more than powerful enough for any application I could think of.
So, is Pi Pico 2 the best Arduino++? What other platforms should a person wanting to graduate from Arduino consider?