Hey DL good post yourself.
By the way the AL3201 is the reverb chip, and the AL3101 and AL3102 are the general purpose DSP chips. It seems that AL3201 and AL3102 get mixed up a lot. You'd think they could have used different numbers to prevent that!
Yep, I suppose the path you start with is usually the path you stay on since it's what you've invested in and are comfortable with. And so I'm biased for sure. But at the same time I think 'C', DSP, and MCU's from the ground up to do DSP effects gets a bit of a bad rap for a couple of reasons.
First and foremost I think that any platform that's both general purpose and powerful will inevitably show solutions with bloat. Like a goldfish that grows to the size of its tank so is a lot of software. I'm convinced that lots of software engineers like making complicated stuff. I've seen many projects that form a technical playground for new ideas and future over-proofing rather than just getting it done as simply as possible. I'm no longer impressed by complexity but rather discouraged.
I can't imagine trying to dive info audio effects plugins on the PC due to the frameworks that have to be learned - probably C++ with loads of class libraries. Or even programming audio effects in Java where there's likely a large framework, libraries, and development flow to assimilate. Having a GUI front end hides all of the complexity and I understand that - but too bad the underlying code wasn't simpler to start with.
I hope my project (FlexFX) demonstrates a DSP platform that's simple, powerful, can be coded in 'C' with practically no coding overhead not related to signal processing. Then you simply learn a bit of 'C', some basic DSP techniques, and you've got something going.
I hear about the Experimental Noize stuff but not sure what's going on there. Sounds experimental

So far a bunch of noise?

I have developed ultra low-power wireless (control and audio) for hearing aids for 10-15 years now. *Many* years ago ASIC's were the way to go for large hearing aid companies due to the need for RF radios and audio processors that functioned within the power and voltage supply envelopes (1.2V zinc air battery, 1mA average power consumption, sub-10mA TX/RX power, voice quality audio over 2.4 gHz, G722 or CVSD encode/decode in hardware, BLE support, multi-band audio compression, etc).
Now IC's are showing up by the bigger chip makers that do these things (Nordic Semi for radios, On Semi for hearing aid DSP's) - and it calls into question whether or not a companies' investment in ASIC's would actually pay off (it costs a lot of time and money to design and fab your own silicon!). If markets drive IC development you can bet those chips will evolve very quickly - look at MCU's with DSP support or ultra low power MCU's. So why would Experimental Noize benefit from an ASIC when ARM M4's and M7's are cheap and hooking up an audio CODEC is pretty basic. And of course there's many DSP's to choose from.
Perhaps there's a similar story for proprietary DSP's. A good approach 10-20 years ago (Keith Barr? Wavefront? Spin? Probably other effects companies?) before MCU/DSP offerings have become mainstream. But these days with multiple offerings of DSP capable MCU's? While those proprietary ideas were maybe genius back then they just seem like a misfit now - same story as other ASICS in other industries. Case in point I haven't seen any serious audio product that doesn't just use ARM, TI, Analog Devices, XMOS? And of course these platforms gather following in many app domains resulting in an ecosystem of dev tools, examples, forums, libraries, etc.
Would love to see something from Experimental Noize and compare it to contemporary/commodity offerings for MCU/DSP stuff. Regardless I bet TI, EnergyMicro, ST Micro, Microchip, Analog Devices will be more competitive for anything related to moderately powered DSP and moderately low power MCU solutions and will keep up with the tech curve faster than anyone making an ASIC. After all where's Wavefront and Spin these days? And what happened to ASICs in the hearing aid space?
Learn some 'C', some DSP, and how to program an MCU then it doesn't matter what Experimental Noize does in terms of ASIC's - which seems to be nothing at the moment - or where they go with their chips for the long haul, which if Wavefront and Spin taught us anything is pretty much nowhere.