> not hobbyist home soldering friendly for custom board designs
I assume by home soldering friendly, you mean too small. I'll make a case for why this isn't a bad thing...
If it's difficult to solder a QFN package, then it will be equally difficult to solder the passives and flash it requires. Its price, availability, and good documentation make up for the package by creating an ecosystem of cheap boards hobbyists can use instead.
For example, I designed a keyboard around the Solder Party RP2040 Stamp (https://www.solder.party/docs/rp2040-stamp/). It integrated all the difficult components in a package that fit between the arrow keys and delete key.
> If it's difficult to solder a QFN package, then it will be equally difficult to solder the passives and flash it requires.
Compatible winbond flash is available in sop-8 package which are very easy to solder.
1206 and 0805 are not hard to solder. Nobody is forcing you to use 0201 and 0402.
Sop, tssop or even LQFP-64 are still quite fine for hobbyists. Those can be soldered & most importantly examined quite easily.
Yes, there are various RP2040 boards that can be bought for as low as 2-3dollars a piece which makes the QFN package less of an issue.
If I need to design my own board, I would almost certainly likely use something else unless I need PIO or some other inherent quality of rp2040.
If it's difficult to solder a QFN package, then it will be equally difficult to solder the passives and flash it requires. Its price, availability, and good documentation make up for the package by creating an ecosystem of cheap boards hobbyists can use instead.
For example, I designed a keyboard around the Solder Party RP2040 Stamp (https://www.solder.party/docs/rp2040-stamp/). It integrated all the difficult components in a package that fit between the arrow keys and delete key.