> the development environment is let's say less than ideal.

Developing C on Linux is less than ideal?

I suspect you are making the wrong comparison. Using a PRU generally lets me skip an FPGA. That's huge. Now, my firmware team can do development in C on a Linux machine rather than Verilog/VHDL in some horrible vendor (Xilinx/Altera) toolset.

If you're programming a PRU, you need to know WHY you're programming a PRU. Otherwise, why wouldn't you just use the main processor?