[SiriusHardware]

It's true that Arduino seeks to allow people to 'do' embedded programming without needing any understanding of the underlying hardware, in fact properly written Arduino programs are 'hardware agnostic', they will run on any Arduino.

What you possibly may not have realised is that Arduino does allow going directly to the hardware if required, I recently posted an Arduino sketch to another thread in which certain parts of the AtMega328 processor are directly accessed in order to perform parallel reads from / writes to the ports at high speed.

With regard to libraries, etc, there is no sense in reinventing the wheel if someone else has already written the exact code you need and put it in the public domain. I'm always grateful to find that someone has already done exactly the thing I was about to do, saving me hours of work in the process.