For what it's worth I've been pretty happy with Freescale. Not sure how they are now after NXP bought them, but the documentation of that hardware was the best I had seen. This translated into an easier time for me as a software guy, because it was easy to look things up.

Additionally it seemed like there's a decent ecosystem around it of board suppliers, which then translates into pretty good software support.

But again, not sure if that's still the case. I chose them for a project in 2015 and have not regretted it since - but have been able to use the exact same IC since then for other projects so I'm not sure if the experience would be different if starting from scratch today.