i will myself be exploring a move over to commercial gm development. you can obviously use "industry standard" code bases - but from my perspective, what is the point? sure, there are advantages. but, honestly, does any technical advantage outweigh the sheer power of being able to create so quickly and so fluidly and so unchained and in such an organized manner? in my mind, not a chance.
That's quite true - I didn't realise until relatively recently how many 'proper' 'raw' programming languages rely on libraries on other languages (usually C) for their basic functions. This sort of thing makes it all the more difficult to discredit GM immediately as not being 'real' - GM still has certain disadvantages as regards security (perhaps not so in 7) and lack of down-to-the-floor compile capability, but as far as I'm concerned, if you can build, say, an RPG with dynamic lighting, particle effects, online connectivity, and any number of other DLL-enabled extras without ever having to fight the machine to get a single window open and worry about things like focus and component-event nonsense... where's the downside?