C2, hands down. I put years of work into loot pursuit in CC and still restarted in C2, and it wasn't just to be able to deploy to more platforms. CC is basically a minefield - some people seem to have no problems, and others encounter tons of them. With loot pursuit, on one event sheet CC would freeze for 7 seconds every time I edited something. If I pressed undo It would lock up for 30 minutes. Copy often didn't work. Placing events was inaccurate (misplaced that event? Wait another 7 seconds to try again). There's still a memory leak hiding somewhere. I still got crashes at runtime. It's just plain not worth the risk.
C2 has a much better workflow, is getting updated frequently, is far more stable, exports to more platforms, etc etc... There's pretty much no reason to use CC anymore with C2 around.
And don't worry about being forced to make 'web mini games' because you're not. With node webkit the output is visually identical to a native exe. The only difference is what's running under the hood which makes no difference for most people anyways.
A game by Alspal was released recently using node webkit: construct.net/en
Tokinsom - you actually can preview as exe, though it takes a little setup. All you need to do is make a node webkit application that goes to the preview URL via the browser object at the start of the layout, then when you're working on the game you want to preview as exe, press preview, close the browser it brings up, then open the node webkit exe. Now when you hit preview it will update the node webkit window with one click instead of another browser.