For a hobby project I’ve used Zephyr via the segger embedded studio for the nrf52. Coming from full stack web development and having dabbled with Arduino IDE, the learning curve was a lot steeper. But I totally understand why, the problem space of supporting all of the different chips and all of the different libraries is huge. It didn’t help that nordics was transitioning from their old stack to the zephyr based one and all the forums and documentation was incredibly confusing because of that. After learning the options menu where you select which parts of the stack to include in your binary things started making a bit of sense, but I still have no idea whether the softdevice is still a thing or not . If you ever want more user feedback feel free to reach out.

There are definitely amazing features in the ecosystem. E.g. the fact that you can run a live debugger on this tiny chip is mind blowing.