RR kicks serious ass. My only regret is that it can't be used on most of the embedded targets I develop for. (Although getting a gdb connection to such targets is itself a battle sometimes)
Embedded development is terrible. Often even if you have a debugger or profiler, it hasn't worked since the platform bring-up 2 years ago, and won't even run because the system doesn't have enough free memory anymore.
Why would they even both to encrypt the firmware? Is that a regulatory requirement somewhere?