ARM32 has the same "feel" to me as the 6502 and 6809 do. If you wanted to have a similar experience as those of us who cut our teeth on those systems, but on a more modern platform, I think you'd get it from ARM32. Really the most noticeable differences are, you won't have to waste cycles (literally) writing out 16- and 32-bit arithmetic carry code all the time, and you get registers instead of the zero-page. (Though the experience of writing carry code is still there, if you want to do any 64-bit arithmetic.)

The historical reason for this is that ARM32 was directly modeled after the 6502, which in turn was based on the 6800, as was the 6809.