Looks it's time to move on. New platform and tools will emerge, I'm sure of it. The only way we can fight corpos is not giving them money and not talking about them.
But the only value of Arduino is the community (and the compile-time layer of syntactic sugar, if you like it). Otherwise, it's just an expensive breakout board for a cheap chip you can buy from Mouser or DigiKey. If you know how to solder, you don't really need the board in the first place.
Second, there's no real difficulty barrier, not anymore. There are point-and-click tools, free integrated IDEs, cheap programming dongles, etc. There are more tutorials for Arduino than the underlying chip, and I'm not saying that doesn't matter - but it boils down to the community, not the hardware.