I own a lot of Photons (and Spark Cores! :P), I've even bought large amounts for hands-on classes, but I've fallen in love with the ESP8266. You can program it using a custom build of the Arduino IDE (if you want), one of my projects lives off a cheap 3.7V battery pack for weeks at a time. I love it! My favorite time spent with hardware hacks was in my AVR and PICAXE days, the ESP8266 gives me the best feelings about those + modern conveniences.
The future is looking really exciting too, Particle's new cellular chips open up a lot of possibilities (especially with their out of the box no-need-to-use-a-dynamic-dns-system), and I will definitely litter my apartment with ESP32s -- built-in bluetooth 4.2, that can talk to the built-in bluetooth on my new Raspberry Pis, I love 2016!
The future is looking really exciting too, Particle's new cellular chips open up a lot of possibilities (especially with their out of the box no-need-to-use-a-dynamic-dns-system), and I will definitely litter my apartment with ESP32s -- built-in bluetooth 4.2, that can talk to the built-in bluetooth on my new Raspberry Pis, I love 2016!