I love CC for its open-sourcedness. That's why I came and got involved! Seems that since the source was handed to the community, progress has ground to a halt though :(
The next runner-up to CC is GameDevelop, which is free but not open source. It's good, and has a few things I wish CC had, but CC still blows it away. The main areas where CC needs some TLC are fixing bugs (Lots of them, and many little annoyances. Things that should work, don't.), half-baked or missing features (screensaver check box, anyone?) and portability (Which is unlikely to happen, ever. CC was made, pretty much, for DX9 only.).
I still love CC, but I'm somewhat afraid to go on with it with the chance that the project may become dead sooner than later (or as I see it anyways). The main hindrance to CC going forward is, seeing that it was made by still-learning college students, that it is clunky and not very flexible (outside of plugins, I mean).
Love to help, but I haven't done any C++ since highschool (and that was just baby-step-C++), nor do I have the time (which adds me to the list of people that have critique but no real intent to help). Oh well, complain about free stuff why don't I?