Goodbye

[Scampy]

You are saying its not practical to program an Arduino supported chip and place it into a custom designed PBC as you would a PIC?
If so is it common for Arduino projects to be made up of jumpered development modules to make up the final project?

To a degree yes. The ATMEGA 2560 is an 8 bit micro running at 16mhz, with 256 KB of program space, but its in a 100 pin TQFP package which makes programming and soldering to a custom hobby PCB more of a challenge compared to an 8 bit PIC which is in a DIP or SOIC package.

I've just ported a project that was originally developed around an 18F based PIC in DIP package. I developed a custom PCB with all the supporting components on it and then would program the PIC via my EasyPIC5 and then place that into the board. Porting this to the Ardiumo based platform the custom PCB had the majority of the supporting components on it, but the board was designed to plug directly into the header pins on the Mega2560 board, like a large custom shield (as can be seen here testing the TFT screen). The mega was a cloan purchased for £11 from Amazon, and cost less than the individual ATMEGA 2560 chip on its own.