My 2 cents: I came here from Multimedia Fusion, taking the risk to port an almost decade long ongoing project (you know, learning by doing) to Construct Classic, and I would never switch back. Don�t know if you consider MMF2 a tool for serious game production, but it was these core problems of the authoring tool that would put me in a dead end, and for all the years that stuff like this is out there, including Klik And Play and The Games Factory, you can end up pretty much screwed if you don�t work around all these quirks that you are presented along the way to your finished product, saying that Clickteam has done a rather poor job sorting out these teething troubles. I mean, cannot distribute custom private variables to objects, what the hell?
Then the awful performance of the hardware renderer, don`t know if they sorted this out yet, but seriously couldn�t care less anymore.
Bottom line is that yes, CC may be stopped in it�s tracks, but the developers are not. My impression is that, given the circumstance that you know what you are doing (and you kind of have to if you want to have some classy output with either tool), you can still get there.
I managed to pull of awesome stuff like full featured bumpmapped lighting with lights as much as your GPU can handle, you just have to sit down, take a breath, take a look at your options and then pull it off. Where else, besides some framework like Unity, does this NOT happen?