Awesome thread, PJ, and great videos! How couldn’t I find it before? It just summarizes all of our discussions in another thread as well as answers some of my questions I had.
I have moved from Arduino IDE to PlatformIO as soon as I had around 10 h/cpp files and was super happy with it. However, then with your help, PJ, I’ve realized you definitely need to go off Arduino framework if you want all the features working flawlessly in your device. The NCS extension for VS is awesome: terminals, etc. are way better than in PIO, in my opinion. DeviceTree is a special nice feature for me. It takes time to understand it, but it provides such a layer of encapsulation: like you just provide a button overlay for XIAO and the “native” nordic Button\Led service starts working out of the box for you. So far I am very happy with the switch.
One downside: I’ve started the Intermediate course and I see, that many of the exercises are not yet ported to the latest 2.9 SDK. So, after the fundamentals I’ve switched right away to the BLE course.