Technical feasibility studies and regression testing are important for professional game developers, and if you implement them, there's absolutely no reason to complain later about performance or bugs.
> At this rate, the only people that came to use Construct 2 and made something great with it have been smacked in the face by it's limitations and are feeling big pain because of it. It's kind of turning out that the developers of Airscape and The Next Penelope wasted their time making a free advertisement for Construct 2 that they can't make money off of because Ashley can't be bothered to make Construct 2 into a real "powerful, full featured and professional game development software".
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I agree completely. But the causes, in my opinion, are different. The wall most users run into when they try to get serious with C2 is related to workflow. It's hard to collaborate, hard to integrate with your asset pipeline (art, music, SFX, GFX and text), hard to build a half-decent UI that's flexible enough to let you add new features,
hard to keep your code reusable, and so on.
But it's getting better. For instance, it used to be really painful to debug, but now the debugger solves 80% of the problems. But look at what had to be done - the debugger lives entirely in the browser, it's in effect a whole new program sitting outside the IDE, because the current IDE is too crap to handle the things the debugger needs in order to function.
Working with tiles is a huge pain, tying extensions together is also painful, every plugin that needs to draw something on the IDE or invoke a config window (i.e. tilemap and spriter) is basically doomed (unless scirra is the one making it).
> The reason Unity3D, MMF and GameMaker cost a lot is because they need that money to fund development for improving the engine and making exporters. Construct 2 is a lot cheaper and it does show. I get that Ashley wants to improve the Construct 2 engine
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The engine we have currently is already very powerful, what we need is a new editor. Look at the recent optimizations like render cells and tell me you'd rather have more of that, instead of productivity features like the debugger! Ashley even offered to look into projects, free of charge, if they run slowly.
Look how far we've come by relying on HTML5 alone! Back when I started, we couldn't even think of mobiles, it was browser only, and even then, chrome only - and now people are complaining about GC-related microstuttering in mobiles? I'm not saying it's not important - it is, smooth gameplay is a cornerstone of design - but it's just that those problems will go away - we've had issues with input lag, framerate locking, audio playback issues, monstrous multiplayer delays and the teams responsible have always fixed the problems eventually, and when they don't (such as ludei's old wrapper, I hear the new one is much better) they're soon deprecated and replaced with something better.
Productivity, on the other hand has remained relatively constant (except for the debugger), and I'm 100% behind Scirra when they wish to focus on solving that.
So you're saying that, we have no reason to complain about Node-Webkit breaking our performance because we had to use it to test and export our game?
I've never used the debugger, I tried it once or twice but I saw absolutely no use for me personally. So I don't see any worth in it.
As for the engine we currently have that is "very powerful, what we need is a new editor" I dare you to say that to the devs of Airscape and The Next Penelope, who managed to do what very little Indie developers do a make a game that companies want on their company and are fully ready to pay yet are handicapped by Construct 2 not having the exporters. MMF might be a UI nightmare, but to be fair it is more powerful than Construct 2 and has all the exporters anybody should ever need. And using MMF is still easier than writing real code.
I have looked at the recent optimization like the render cells, I'm one of the users that was talking to Ashley about it and a few other things (Me and Tokinsom got him to make the action where you can reset specific parts of the layout, along with persistent objects).
And those are more useful to me than features like the debugger, which I've never had any use for.
As for Ashley looking into projects, as far as I know it's always been because someone had a problem with Construct 2 either not doing something or not doing it correctly. So obviously he has to look into the project to find if there's any problem.
"Look how far we've come by relying on HTML5 alone!", yes I can see, two developers got crushed by it and even more have stated, in this very forum that they're not going to use Construct 2 and someone even mentioned going to my personal nightmare, Stencyl. (Shudder).
Those microstutters weren't in mobiles, it was caused by Node-Webkit, on real computers, as in the ones that play Battlefield 9001 and edit Avatar. Those are important issues, Aurel could have developed The Next Penelope for infinite years to make it infinitely beautiful, but if every movement was going to constantly stutter and the FPS was going to constantly appear to be dropping even though it's technically at 60 then nobody is going to play it. And Node-Webkit is not going to get any of the blame, or Construct 2, it's the developer that has to deal with everyones abuse.
Lastly, we still have audio playback issues. I still can't get audio fully playing on preview and I'm running the latest release of Construct 2, which is ironically the stable release. But it's probably got nothing to do with C2, yet I don't know if it is or isn't.
Honestly, it sounds like a lot of the users here are defending Sccira because they don't want to look bad because they spent money on it (there's a whole psychological study around people buying crap and then defending it because it's their purchase. But don't think I'm saying that Construct 2 or Sccira is crap, it's not, it's a great company and engine so you'd be wrong in thinking I was implying that.)
Construct 3 should be 3, it should move on from 2. I honestly can't see while the current idea for C3 can't be a major update for C2, while Ashley slowly develops C3 as an engine for PC and Consoles. C2 is obviously purely for portable platforms and only that, the only reason we can export to PC is because our future robot overlords at Google decided to make Node-Webkit.
What would've happened to Construct 2 if nobody ever made those HTML5 exporters? Would Ashley have done it himself? Or abandon Construct 2 same just as he did with Classic?
Last paragraph for this post;
At one point, 
Ashley is going to end up having to develop native exporters, either for Construct 2, 3 or 4.
It's going to eventually happen, if he keeps relying on third-parties to make exporters nobody is going to use these engines for any real games unless their for mobile, in which case they're just phone games. For phones.
We need either Ashley to make Construct 3's own native exporters or him to get somebody to hack his engine to do so, otherwise Construct 3 is just going to be Construct 2 with a better editor, in which case paying another 130 USD for it is going to feel like theft to me no matter how good the new UI is.
Improve the engine, don't make it look prettier, improve it.
Stop stalling and do it, because you're eventually going to either have to do it or abandon calling it professional and fully featured.
Actually it's not fully, fully featured now. Every other engine I've ever encountered has native exporters and it's ilk.
The only thing Construct 2 has going for it is it's ability to be used by anyone at any time to, it has a wonder UI that's infinitely intuitive and it's event system is something that dwarves would be jealous of it's level of craftsmanship.
Other than that, it's a fairly basic, regular game making engine with a little, few large limitations that have absolutely no problem completely crippling a developer.
Note: I had a better post than this, but I accidentally clicked a button on my mouse and it sent me back a page destroying all my writing.