I have to say, C has some dramatic advantages. I agreed, at the beginning, with everything you said. However, now that I've been working in C for a couple months, I can read C almost as well as I can asm. Here are two *BIG* advantages I've found to C, however, and the main instigators to making the switch myself:

1) Teamwork. I also perform most development as an individual. I've actually even got a few products on the market which are very well recieved in their particular niches. However, workload increases have forced me to share the work. But not many people are extremely familiar with asm language for multiple processor families (my projects include AVR and 8051 chips).

2) (quasi)-portabilitity. As mentioned above, my projects involve different processor families. Obviously when performing functions such as initializing interrupts and all, code is processor-specific ... Plus, a few of my routines are extremely timing-critical, so they must still be written in assembly... However, the ability to copy and paste entire applications or functions with only a few SFR changes and rewriting only the critical assembly routines is DRAMATICALLY more convenient than entire conversion of dissimilar assembly languages!!