We really want to work with Nordic, but they makes it hard.

[Bndit]

It seems like a really great company, but after exploring and asking , and searching for a good BLE solution, I just can't find a good fit.

So you want a GOOD processor, and BLE . If you go with the nrf8001 and external MCU you get a pretty old BLE solution, nobody knows if its going to be here next year, AND it requires so many components around it including 2 crystals, which summed up to a price of a BLE module ( around 6$)

If you go with the more advanced solutions such as nrf51 series, you find out that the processors are just there to say : hey we have an ARM inside.

1. No DAC option ( any new ARM has it)
2. No RTC
3. No flash emulator to save stuff between resets / eeprom.

and the list is pretty long, and thats not including long development time.

This is not a rant, quite the opposite, it seems like a great company (and its not from China/ Thailand or whatever) , but every solution you check has at least 1 huge drawback .

Am I completely wrong here ?

[endnode]

Your summary for nRF51 seems to be inaccurate, can you elaborate with some examples what you lack in points 1/2/3 and which competition can offer it? Chip has many HW peripherals, has RTC and TIMER (several of them) and has 256kB of flash. Also why you don't consider nRF52 which is more power effective, has more flash/RAM/peripherals and cost difference is small? To be honest I haven't met better low-power Bluetooth processor on the market, can you hint what can give you more then nRF52?

[endnode]

No, what I'm saying is that if you like that style of programming without deeper understanding of the architecture (and thus not being able to utilize its full potential) but you like to code simply and fast then there are IDEs and nRF5x set-ups like mBed. However in the end you run application on top of another time-sensitive application (= BLE stack) and if you are not careful you simply hit the wall (by adding some busy loops to simulate delay or other intensive function calls) without easy way to debug. So that was a friendly warning, not shaming certain IDE or coding practice. In the end unless you really need low-power SoC just buy RPI Zero or similar platform, cost wise it's close (or even less!) than many nRF52 boards/modules and you can utilize full rich-OS (Linux kernel) with tools like Python. That's what I call simple and fast way.