One more thing to consider: if your time is limited and you have to design/build lots of different devices, stick to more extensive product lines. As an example the NXP Kinetis, while having its share of warts and issues, is a huge product line with hundreds of chips, sharing a similar architecture.<p>This means that you can use a chip that fits requirements well, ranging from tiny simple M0+ devices all the way to monster M4 chips with 1M flash and every peripheral one can imagine. They not only share some peripherals, but you use the same SDK, documentation formats are the same, etc.<p>This is a huge time saver and lets you use the right chip for each project, instead of sticking the same expensive microcontroller everywhere, or using ones from different manufacturers.