I appreciate all these comments as they totally speak to things that have concerned me in recent months. I've only been using C2 for about 9 months, but I fell in love with how fast it was to produce something. I, like others, ran into some performance issues, but was mainly due to an old computer. However that said, I want to make deep games and the idea of Chrome or web games seriously turns me off. I bought C2 because of node-webkit. It's not exactly what I thought it was but Arima I agree whole heartly that if Scirra came out with its own local build exporter that would be a great thing indeed.
I've been using Unity3D for a bit and think that tool is something else, not really comparable to C2. I look at C2 as a good way to prototype a game (a 2D game) and is currently what I am using it for. If I feel my game has real potential I will redo it in Unity. But to do that in Unity I will need a team, and for C2, all I need is me (although one could always use help!). However, I think there are certain designs that lend themselves very well to C2. But the whole 'web game' stigma seems very limiting. I could care less about mobile. Even though I work on mobile games (as a music contractor), I have no real interest that platform.
I love C2, and I love that it has got me way deeper into game development than I ever have been before. I used to code in the IT world (functional programming). And C2 has taught me so much.. it teaches you to think like a game developer. I used Unity and Torque long ago without much success. Going to Unity after designing and producing many small games in C2 helped a great deal. Can't say it enough.
btw Arima, if you've been using Construct for 7 years then you could definitely pick up traditional coding pretty easy.. I'm not saying you'll be coding for Blizzard any time soon, but you should pick it up fairly easy. Do some tutorials, you'll see