Lately, I've seen an "uprise" of Basic Stamp users. This really has me
    intrigued. My question is: If I've started off the "hard way" using
    ASM and custom peripherals/circuits/etc., is it really worth looking
    into the Basic Stamp at all?

Sure, it's worth looking at.  IMO, the stamp is more interesting from the
perspective of the language being well adapted to a certain subset of
embedded applications than for having brilliant hardware, but I think the
stamp development environment is likely to be amazingly fast, even compare
to flash "bare" microcontrollers (and when the stamp came out, well before
flash controllers were available, it was a real innovation!)

I believe that there's a "fractional stamp" implementation in an 16F84
out there as freeware someplace; uses the internal eeprom instead of
external code, with the accompanying limitations on program size.

BillW

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