[jasallen]

Xamarin's IDE is not as good as VS, but it is often much better than XCode, and C# and F# are both more pleasant languages to work in for people with the vast majority of experiences (C++, Java, .Net, Ruby), so even without all the cross platform goodness I prefer to work with Xamarin. (Swift may change some of that, I haven't looked into it yet).

I've never had a problem easily translating Obj C StackOverflows or blog posts to Xamarin/C# so essentially you get the whole community as well, with no worries about Xamarin specificness.

That said, I think their current pricing structure makes sense for them right now. They are not 'quite' at the polish level, not quite at the level that average people can do things averagely. There is still just a little more cross platform knowledge and effort required. The price serves as both a barrier to entry to manage the community size, and provides them enough capital (on top of outside investment) to keep investing toward a fully mass market approach.