The art students with minimal coding experience would take FreeRTOS ten times out of ten over trying to figure out what a compare match timer is, what an interrupt is, how bitwise operations work, etc. The OP was dead-on and I'd bet money that the downvotes are from people that have never had somebody's eyes glaze over when they told them that they "just need to calculate their prescaler values, mask the appropriate bits into the config register, set the number of counts in the compare register, enable the timer interrupt, and register an interrupt vector to handle it".