> I was never a fan of the Maker Movement. While it did get people to tinker, there was always this massive gap between lighting up an LED and using EEPROM, JTAG debugging, interrupts, and even designing some of the more intricate circuit designs to pull of intermediate projects. I found that there were people who knew how to do that stuff and the rest just trying to get by.

Intense gatekeeping in the electronics community is precisely why communities such as Arduino could flourish in the first place (and their creators could benefit financially). Ultimately, people just want to get stuff done and Arduino is a way of doing it. If you go to Stack Exchange, someone will tell you to buy a college textbook and come back in six months once you understand Laplace transforms. An artist working on an installation doesn't need that. A person building an automated cat feeder doesn't need that. In fact, almost no one does, it's just something we torture EE students with.

I think a lot of the negativity toward Arduino boils down to saying "nooo, it's supposed to be hard!". But if you want the Arduino crowd to get more interested in your field of expertise, you need to build them a ramp, not to tell them they're not real electrical engineers.