I'd put it another way: on VLIW DSPs they HAD to provide a good assembler, or they would be too difficult to program. From what I remember on some of them you have to manually manage the pipeline -- e.g. a jump instruction needs to occur several instructions BEFORE the actual jump, because by the time that instruction gets executed, several instruction after it will already have been decoded. You really don't want to do that manually.

The only non-DSP processor I know that required programmers to schedule jumps ahead of time manually was the Intel i860, and it WAS too difficult to program, that's why it disappeared.