Well, it's a matter of not really being satisfied with anything that I have so far. PICs are a little power hungry, kinda large and don't play nice with C compilers as I've mentioned. Atmel has some hardware bugs that are really hurting us and don't seem to be getting fixed anytime soon. It's been some time since I used the HC11/12/16 series so I'm not up to date on what they are like these days.
I'm not too worried about a $1 versus a $10 microcontroller, more about paying out the nose for support tools. Since we do pretty unique and one-of projects around here we're not looking for volume discounts or large scale manufacturing.
Yeah, I have nothing against hardware timers generating PWM. I just don't want to resort to bit-banging in software....
Well, thye defintiely can be done using software, but the real power of microcontrollers is having the hardware take care of the messy stuff and the software is presented with nicely formatted data. This is especially important for our applications because we have so much going on at one time that trying to manage SPI and I2C and serial (UART) and reading encoders and generating PWM, etc. etc. would quickly swamp any microprocessor out there that we might consider. I'm looking for hardware support for the various peripherals to decrease load on the ALU and avoid having to do (even more) nasty software timing analysis.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Thanks to everyone for their advice! I'll take a look at the ones suggested and see what strikes the fancy.
-Will