I'm so so muddled it stings.
I know I'm just a basic game dev and moving at a snails pace, but I have always been so proud and eager to put the Construct logo at the intro of my game and such (obv asking Scirra first but I'm just a happy customer so it's a priority to me).
I still have a strong loyalty and I adore Scirra and Construct, smart people that took a huge "gamble" and was 100% on point with said gamble. But, this feels different compared to past drama...
If this change literally does nothing to benefit addon devs or users, creates work for addon devs with no gain, and a bunch of addons will die due to impossibility or jaded addon devs, then it's really hard to empathise with Scirra.
Scirra getting angry support emails is the key thing to empathise with.
So 2 years from now, Scirra will still get angry users even if it's a chrome/apple/nwjs/webview issue, they're angry at Scirra which we all know is incorrect since it's out of Scirra's hands. If it's educational sector, at least can be formal and have policies for Scirra to protect themselves (whereas game devs are just ruthless as we know).
So angry emails will still exist, just 1 type of them is eliminated, at a massive cost to freedom and it looks like alienating some key members of the C3 community.
And again, the only reason I care, even though I don't know anything about addon development, is because I care about the game I envision. It's painful when there's a feature just barely out of reach, like I started using the new Dynamic animations, but there's a few missing things that I only discovered when half-way implementing a new system. I know there's high chance I can ask addon dev for help, but low chance to get upvotes on suggestions platform to maybe be accepted/rejected.
Edit: worth noting, I empathise with the warning that was always displayed about undocumented stuff, but I guess I'm not as attracted to addons that automate stuff that can be done via events (that's the fun part I wanna work on myself!), I like the addons that fill in a small gap, fix a small thing, enable a small feature. They're often tiny things but matter when trying to craft your game exactly how you envision, or utilise the features C3 offers to it's full extent.