Well I haven't made any design or toolchain choices. All that was Novak's job, so I'm trusting his decisions and picking up where he left off. I do actually have degrees in embedded and programming so I'm capable, just out of practice. And either way, it's not happening for a BM1384 pod.
I'm not buying your answer.
You must have looked over his shoulder. Did he paid for his toolchain or used a free (limited) one? What was his debugging box that he used?
I know that Atmel (now acquired by Microchip) offers Windows Atmel Studio 7 unlimited for free covering AVR, AVR32 and ARM32 (raw metal, not Linux).
You can post here or on any other thread of your choice. It is fairly obvious that the microcontroller and toolchain choice will be brain bandwidth (wetware) limited, so please post what were the tools that you've used and are comfortable with. (Plural "you", meaning "sidehack" & "Novak" & whoever else works with singular you "sidehack).