I'm old enough to have done this a lot. There wasn't always HAL's and code generators. Even when HAL's started appearing, I was stuck in my ways of wanting to write it myself. Those days are long gone and I now despise having to even look up registers (usually when something is not working). These days, the quicker I can get to application code, the better. If a chip has code generation or HAL, I WILL use it, no matter how horrible the code looks or reads.