I can see the value of these tools to people who already know everything about this chip and just want help organizing it. For a company that is already heavily invested in ST, I imagine CubeMX is quite handy. However, I am not in that group; I am building my company's first ARM product.
When I used the default configuration for my board, I noticed two things: first, over half the pins were yellow, which made me wildly uncomfortable (I do not ship products that compile with warnings), and second. the Graphics were disabled by default. And I couldn't figure out how to enable them. Since graphics were a critical part of my evaluation this was an immediate problem.
I did use CubeMX to generate code for initializing my timers (by only enabling the specific timers I wanted and disabling everything else), which was handy, but unfortunately this also failed as apparently the timers can only count external events via external clocking, rather than as a direct input capture signal, and none of the external clock pins are exposed on the discovery board. I suspect they are being used for something else - which I could have verified if STMicro had shown me exactly how their board was laid out.
The fundamental issue remains: if CubeMX is the "proper" way to configure a board, then STMicro should lead the way. Their .ioc files should be models for the rest of us, showing what a professional approach looks like. Their discovery board should show off their tools to their best advantage, and vice versa.
The fact that they fell down on this highly visible task does not inspire confidence that they will be there when I am in a tight spot. Hence, the poor evaluation score. I mean, there are other options out there, and some of those manufacturers are getting decent evaluation scores.
