The problem starts when someone unfamiliar with low level OS details writes a network service; you end up hacked. With arduino people get false sense of knowledge and when they put the things togethe for a real world application, it ends up bad.

> I'm motivated to learn top down in electronics.

Very dangerous and potentially deadly approach (electric shock, battery caught fire, floating inputs cooked the processor etc.) Electronics is not programming: errors have tanible consequences.

Arduino has its niche: it is artists; it actually started as a part of Processing. However, what bothers me is the culture around it: newspeak ("fritzing" etc.), lack of understanding that it is a toy and inferior thing, not suitable for real-world applications; abundance of bad hardware designs; overall drive toward abstraction, which is not ok when dealing with real world tasks.