+1, the SDK is kind of opinionated and I found that often it won't play nicely with e.g. routing clocks/plls different than default. Coding directly against the datasheet gives you freedom to fully leverage the chip and the extra code you need to write this way is honestly not a lot.
Still the good ol' Arduino IDE for regular stuff and I've been dabbling in going full platform.io but change is hard
With kids id probably try Arduino. I personally prefer c and make/cmake/meson
gcc, make, no sdk and no libc. baremetal all the way, yeehaw
+1, the SDK is kind of opinionated and I found that often it won't play nicely with e.g. routing clocks/plls different than default. Coding directly against the datasheet gives you freedom to fully leverage the chip and the extra code you need to write this way is honestly not a lot.
Jetbrain's CLion with the pico sdk. Yeah, that means C.