Or have some drinks with EEs and get them to value software development ease of use: things like using top of the line, or at least midrange MCU with enough flash for debug builds, populating debug connectors on EVT builds etc
But they chose a cheaper ARM CPU without a MMU or hardware floating point. That meant it would not run shared libraries, everything was statically linked. We ran out of space in the Flash, and the project was in crisis. The solution was using a lua interpreter.
These days, I like high level platforms like Nerves: https://www.nerves-project.org/