To contribute my own experience so far...

I think subscription is pretty much the norm now, the few commercial engines that still charge a one time premium, still require you to pay for major upgrades every few years, so to get the latest features/bug fixes, it is effectively a subscription, just one you pay more sporadically. I suspect these engines will move to a subscription basis in the near future anyway... I'm from SEA too, and money is tight, not sure in Vietnam, but here I can subscribe for a month when I can afford to, sometimes I can't so I focus on the art etc. for a while, until I can afford to buy another months subscription.

Every engine has some reliance on third parties, at the very minimum the operating system and hardware drivers. At the lowest end, would be low level frameworks like SDL, SFML, Allegro and raylib, in the middle engines like Unity, GameMaker, Heaps and Defold, and then engines with a greater dependence on third parties, like Construct, Cocos and RPG Maker. The extra third party dependencies are Chromium, which I really don't see as an issue with companies like Google and now Microsoft invested in it, Cordova for mobile and nw.js for desktop which are potentially a greater concern to me, but for now, they are still actively developed and I don't see them as an issue for a game currently in development.

As Ashley mentioned, every engine will encounter bugs or issues, but I will say that in my experience the Construct team has been very, very responsive to issues they are able to fix. I think in my short time here I have submitted 4-5 issues and they were all fixed within 48 hours. This is invaluable in my opinion and was a major reason why I decided to switch to Construct. I still have a 'blocking' or 'business critical' issue in another paid engine that was submitted 2 years ago and still hasn't been fixed.

As for native vs web/hybrid app, it's going to come down to the individual game, in my case performance is good enough for the games I'm making, not light casual games, but not ultra-heavy simulations like Factorio, more on the level of Heroes of Might and Magic or Panzer General. A deciding factor for me, along with the responsive bug fixes, is the sheer speed that the Construct team has been adding new, thoughtfully implemented and useful features to the engine. For a relatively small team I think they are leading the pack, and I believe a large part of that is thanks to the web based engine. Some other engines I have used and paid for, have fallen into stagnation, but now I feel excited because every week or so there is a beta release of Construct with something I actually want to use in my games.

Ashley if you look at the example for flipping the texture, if you are using relative mode, setting column/row to (1,0) to texture coordinate (-1,0), is effectively setting texture coordinate to (0,0), which should be valid.

I'm hoping this will also be very useful for HD art where you have a lot of empty space in large sprites, to reduce overdraw by 'collapsing' mesh points in transparent parts of the sprite.

Last of all, not so much feedback as a begging pleading wish, let mesh points have z-elevation, you would then have instant awesome psuedo-3D to easily have top down buildings like the original GTA, or dungeon crawls like Eye of the Beholder.

Sorry here is the screenshot for scrolling texture:

My last example is scrolling the texture within the sprite, which is a bit harder to explain, for example imagine you have a conveyor belt, instead of animating the conveyor belt moving, you can scroll a seamless texture to make it look like the conveyor belt is moving. The example below shows a texture that has been scrolled horizontally 30% to the right.

FEEDBACK: This was a bit fiddly, especially with relative mode, so I would suggest using absolute mode in this case. You will note I had to increase the number of mesh points and collapse the middle points together to the same position. This would be much simpler if it implemented UV wrapping - I'm not sure of the OpenGL terminology - but that's what I would call it. Then I could more simply use a 2x2 mesh, and set column/row (0,0) to texture (0.3,0), (0,1) to (0.3,1), (1,0) to (1.3,0), and (1,1) to (1.3,1).