This seems to be pretty effective. For over a decade I have not used a debugger and 3 years ago I picked up arduino and have enjoyed programming it since. My biggest problem with arduino is no way to trace problems with a debugger. This method works pretty well, since lots of the problems are not hardware related but rather software related. Especially when generating dynamic menus for a project I'm working on, it's ideal. All classes are software and they only interact with hardware in a much later stage. With simple printf I can see how the menus look like with my phi_prompt.
After some tweaking, I was able to simulate the PROGMEM strings and functions in Dev C++, meaning I can push strings to PROGMEM, which means regular memory on PC and FLASH on ATMEGAs. I'm still testing this.