Funny that you mention that, I am currently in the process of designing the "next" generation of the project in question. Luckily I was able to convince the product owner to switch from PIC18 to NXP ARM chips.

I have loads of experience with the LPC series and I only realized how nice they are to work with until this project came by. Also, GCC + OpenOCD + gdb is a very nice toolchain to work with, although the first versions of OpenOCD were a bit of a pain to get (and keep!) running.