My experience is that most hobby projects are RAM limited when people are using the AVR chips. Whether its trying to hold a copy of an LCD view, or any sort of moderate data structure. The ATMega328 is 8K of RAM. The M0+ chips seems to all come with 64K of RAM, and given that folks are writing in C/C++ rather than Assembler that is quite helpful.

I agree with you on the general tolerances to abuse though. I've filled out a couple of surveys sent to me by semiconductor folks (I often get one after attending a free training session) and I've mentioned several times that a short/overvoltage hardened chip would be a useful thing for me. You can do that with off chip parts but since manufacturers are wondering what to do with an abundance of silicon surface area to distinguish their products, I continue to suggest that would be one way.