I've heard about the hw bugs a little but couldn't find much information about them.
I'm mostly just using it for the course which was highly recommended in multiple places, so I hope I won't encounter many of these bugs.
To be honest, the whole picking a board thing was quite overwhelming, with many recommendations, boards, variations, etc. Hopefully once I've finished the course I'll have some more knowledge to help me pick the next board.
And if you don't use the arduino ecosystem, but use an RTOS on an Arduino, it's a perfectly valid dev board for learning real embedded systems development.