Somebody said "FREE LUNCH" ??? :)

I use a task scheduler that I wrote to fire tasks at regular intervals. There's a little bit of a time penalty in the "check tick/decrement timers" routine and also the scheduler itself (I call it a gopher). But I'm able to finish my projects much faster now that I use it. It's the tradeoff I was willing to make. If I did happen to exceed tolerances, I would have no problem going back to the old tried and true churn and burn. But until that day comes, I'm just fine.

I think what has been reiterated here by the "veterans", that an RTOS is unneeded, is true. But I think, if you have the time, the skills you get from writing a RTOS would be great.