Not sure I really got what ChanceTran meant overall. So a couple remarks from what I think they might have meant:
- You can absolutely use the RP2040 with C. You can absolutely go 100% bare metal, although the C SDK is not bad, at least for starters! But CMSIS include files are provided, so you can definitely go bare metal right away without the SDK.
- It has only 1 "true" timer, as we said, but has a number of other resources that can be used as such: PWM and PIO. Yes, the PIO is very flexible and you can use its two X and Y registers (per state machine) as 32-bit timer counters, at up to the system clock. So in the end, the fact there's only one dedicated timer is not as limiting as one could initially think. The PIO actually allows to implement cycle-accurate stuff in a fully programmable way, which not a lot of other MCUs allow.
Not sure I got the essence of the rant.
So anyway, curiosity got the best of me, and I finally took the plunge, ordered a couple boards and started evaluating the RP2040 with the C SDK. It confirms that it's an interesting chip with an odd mix of features, but it certainly "beats" most MCUs you can find at this price point, or even at several times the cost in somes cases.