I was recently frustrated with the IDEs and tooling in general imposed by some of the hardware brands (the FPGA was especially kiling me!). I decided to explore would it be possible to program a microcontroller without annoying IDEs and expensive accessories, and I didn't want any pre-made development board either. So I got an AVR microcontroller, programmed it with mainline GCC only and flashed it with avrdude (another free and open source tool, easy to use) via AVR Dragon. The AVR Dragon bit I admit is a bit fancy, I just had it laying around, but even a spare Arduino can be used to program another AVR chip.