However, im curious as to this "you are far from limited to using just C", what is less limiting?
What I meant is that you can program PICs all day and not know any C, as long as you learn one of the other languages...
i thought C was the rawest code PICs use if that makes sense meaning that its likely to be the language you can do most on = less limiting
Assembly is the 'rawest' language you can use to program any micro, C is just like any other high level language, it needs to be converted to assembly and then programmed... C doesn't offer any real extended functionality over any other language, all the languages have their ups and downs but at the end of the day they all do pretty much the same thing...
At the end of the day a lot of it is optimization of the code, some compilers create better code in the end, but that is not to say C creates better code then BASIC... It's fully dependent on the application and compiler used...
If you want the absolute most flexibility and optimization you learn assembly, but it's has a harder learning curve vs other high level languages, and in most cases that level of optimization is never needed...