Same here, actually...
but never the less, people do stick with what they know. There's a story of the little old lady who, upon hearing that Ford was going to stop producing model Ts, went straight to her local dealer and bought five. The delighted salesman eventually asked her why she didn't buy a newer car, which came with the new easier shifting transmission. She replied,"because it took my husband three years to teach me how to shift that monster, and now that he's dead, there's no one left to teach me something better!"
I originally cottoned to the PIC several years ago because it only needed four clocks per instruction, unlike the 12 clocks per instruction used by the 'antiquated' 80C51s at work. However, we are now upgrading to processors from either Dallas or Philips. They use half or less the clocks, with a few enhancements that make life easier, while running the tens of thousands of lines of code we wrote, with a few quick mods.
Hey, don't look at me! I recently read a thread where the author quit after his department told him to continue teaching assembler for the IBM 360, a model he hadn't seen anyone write code for for many years!
And Parallax still thrives selling Stamps to the educational world at large. Every other supplier that has a processor with a bootloader claims to be the next logical step in the evolution to a processor better than the Stamp, but yuh gotta start somewhere.
I am now interested in the Cypress CY8... series because of the graphic programming environment they claim to offer. You drag and drop input, output and logic manipulation symbols into the window and it generates the code for you! We'll see how true that is when the kit gets here...
And progress marches (and shuffles, hobbles and staggers) on.
kenjj