I’ve only picked up Defold about a week ago, but we’ve managed to build a working proof-of-concept game in the global game jam – with @dmitrijus.babicius and @Oleg_The_Evangelist . For me it was really helpful when @Oleg_The_Evangelist could immediatelly point to the relevant library/example.
I think the Community Assets should be promoted more (maybe mentioned more in tutorials, introductions etc., or maybe they were, but I missed it). Maybe some of your devs could also contribute to it more (as an example, add A* as a proper package, because now I had to copy/paste .lua files manually).
I think there are still some rough edges in Defold (most are known bugs) and downsides of using external packages. It really struck me how hard it was to detect if a game object was clicked. It took me at least an hour to hack my way through just to have something so basic and I’m not really happy about how it turned out.
It’s good that you have strong consistent design/architecture principles in Defold, but they shouldn’t come at the expense of essential usability.