Would a PIC suit me better than an AVR?
Yes you need to write good code intended to be maintainable and to make it easy to catch mistakes before you run it.  However, debugging is still a reality.  In a small embedded system, you can't put print statements all over the place.  There is no place to print to.  You also can't test the code in the same language on a PC because on a microcontroller you're always dealing with the hardware which isn't present on the PC.

A simulator on a PC can be a useful tool, but the more your code has to interact with external hardware, the less useful it becomes.  Eventually you need to test and debug on the real target hardware.  People telling you they don't do that or that you don't need it obviously haven't done a lot of real microcontroller projects.

I don't know the Atmel debugging environment, so can't compare it to that of PICs.  Both processor families can do what you want.  If one of them has better availability in your area or you think the setup has a cost advantage, go for it.  You're certainly not going to go wrong with PICs, although that's probably true of any of the major microcontroller lines.