I beg to differ, I love jumping into beds with new kids. AVR is not a new kid on the block really since they were avialable in the early to mid 90s. You are right that there are alot of other factors involved. Pic does have excellent datasheets, i perfer the pic datasheets over atmel datasheets. Also pics are very tough, it can take a good wack of voltage or force and still perform, they also offer very high flash write cycles. Pics also have lots of goodies for motor control and offer an abundance of A/D ports. My biggest biggest dissapointment is that I have yet to find a pic that can offer PWM of 2 or more frequencies, i really needed that bad.

But honestly everywhere I go people ask why I use the PIC and not the AVR or ARM platform, the simple truth was that I already bought a programmer, bought many PICS, bought several language suites, invested so much time in them that I really did not have the luxury of switching. I can not tell you how many times i had to comprimise my design objectives because the PIC just could not cut the mustard. Most comprimises worked out very well, but sometimes I wonder what I would of achieved with a more powerful platform.

Not all is peaches and cream with the AVR, the documentation of the C language suites is very bad, and to top it off I really knew very little about object oriented C to begin with. For a harware platform that is so good the software sure is nasty. Man imagine what I could do if I had a great toolsuite with excellent documentation and a good forum. Yup the grass is always greener on the other side.

The biggest thing I want to get across to anyone reading this is to try out different platforms and different languages.