Best ARM Development Board

[imprez55]

I know there are some electronics guys here, so hopefully someone has some background with ARM. I have done some stuff with AVR's but I am looking to do some projects that require something higher powered and my first choice (arbitrarily) is ARM. I'm currently using a Coridium dev board that a professor of mine owns to do some research. It is proving to be quite difficult to work with because the documentation is scarce, the IDE is terrible and the support is nearly non-existent except for 1 yahoo group. I am simply trying to use SPI to program a DDS and its not working at all. So I was wondering if any of you have any ARM experience and if so where did you start?

I have looked into a few boards already but I'm not sure what direction to head. The mbed board would be perfect if it wasn't for their online style IDE/compiler; I don't think I could bring myself to use that type of a system and I think its too controlling. The BeagleBoard looks great, except for the $150 price tag which I really don't want to spend at this point. The Renesas RDK is slightly cheaper at $100 but that is still a little more then I want to spend and it seems to not be used by very many people. I would like as large of a community behind a product as possible so that I can be helped if a problem arises as well as provide enough sample code for me to go out on my own with something. Maybe I have been spoiled with the community backing AVR's, but I don't want to end up dropping good money on something that ends up preventing me developing the projects I want to. I don't think it is too much to ask to have a reliable SPI interface, good IDE (or the option of someone making a better version with open source code), and a strong following with plenty of example code.

[imprez55]

Really, no one has any ARM experience? I'm open to other suggestions, maybe even propeller.