The PIO functionality, I think, is a killer feature for interfacing with retro consoles. I've been working on a Sega Dreamcast controller adapter and the PIO made it pretty easy to start interfacing with the console's custom protocol, even for somebody with near-zero experience in this kind of thing.
Zmk has pretty good support for rp2xxx. It’s a lot nicer than QMK where you don’t have to write c to make key map. I made a mistake in my pcb and didn’t hook up my SPI display to a spi peripheral, and all I had to do was set up the device tree to make the display use the SPI driver that is implemented in PIO.
