Agreed. The PIC32MZ is a neat MIPS microcontroller (if you're able to tolerate the MPLab Xpress IDE). Unfortunately the cheapest PIC32 board they offer is the DM320001 at $50. I picked up a SAMD10 "Xplained mini" for $9 from Digikey, and one can get sub-$2 STM32F103 boards from AliExpress.

Arguably the Cortex-M0+-based D10 isn't really comparable to the PIC32, but that's sort of the point. No Arduino-sized community is going to develop around an architecture with a $50 minimum entry point... Maybe I should stop complaining about it and try to fix it :-)