I choose the Daisy specifically because it WASN’T using CubeIDE. If you’ve been on the ST Forum you may recognise me as one of the people who constantly call out ST on this abomination together with HAL, the most inefficient software development library known to mankind. Daisy currently has a few bits of HAL remaining but Electrosmith did promise to get rid of them.
But anyway the recommended Daisy development model is the full ARM toolset. Arduino support is available as well but isn’t going to be suitable for advanced development.