Agreed, although I prefer the D1 mini (http://www.wemos.cc/Products/d1_mini.html) - it's just a bit smaller (and cheaper?) than the NodeMCU.

The ESP-01 (which I started with) is quite painful to program, though - it uses a bizarre baud rate (78k?) and shares its GPIO with its programming pins.

exactly, this is what i meant, for simple projects, the cheap costs vs time to invest to get it running was not worth it

I dunno, I managed to get it running within a day or two, and had zero experience in this kind of electronics before.

Used a raspberry pi to control it, with a button to switch it into programming mode. No soldering, just wires and breadboard.

But now I use a d1 mini since its more comfortable/less breakage from accidentally removing wires when cleaning.

I'm a software guy and had never picked up a soldering iron in my entire life. I managed to get my first esp8266 (the adafruit huzzah) soldiered to a little temp/humidity sensor on a small permanent breadboard (not sure the exact name) and had it pushing data into my home graphite server. Took me all of 2 days start to finish.