What's the plan regarding better documentation? That's the number one reason I've lost interest in Xamarin. Outwardly, esp. coming from a C# background, it seems awesome. Then you try to build something other than a todo list and you quickly find out how lacking the docs are. You might find a decent sample for Android, but then nothing for iOS, or vice verse. Forget about OS-X development, the docs are even worse when you get outside of iOS/Android.
I would reconsider Xamarin if the docs improved greatly. Maybe with MS involvement this will finally happen?
MS at this point would be better served by integrating React and React-Native in Visual Studio 2015 and Community. I know they recently came out with support for VS Code, but that's a different beast if you are a traditional C#/.Net/VS guy. From my experience with both, React is a pleasure to use, while Xamarin often had me cursing my decision to use the platform.
I work actively in Xamarin with both iOS and OSX. Documentation can be somewhat lacking, but it's usually not too hard to figure out. Xamarin.Forms is pretty well documented, and if ever you need to dive into platform specific code, the translation from Obj-C/Java to C# is about as straightforward as you can get. The classes have the same names, the methods take the same arguments, and if it deviates, the autocomplete provides enough info to figure out the difference. The only exception I've found is for Obj-C constants. It's not always clear which class they're buried in.
Overall, I've really enjoyed Xamarin. Development is quick and easy, you can use a lot of NuGet packages, and if you think C# first, platform specific second, it's easy to port code between platforms.
I agree with you about the documentation not being very useful, but Xamarin isn't what's usually referred to as "hybrid". It's fully native code, no webviews needed.
I would reconsider Xamarin if the docs improved greatly. Maybe with MS involvement this will finally happen?
MS at this point would be better served by integrating React and React-Native in Visual Studio 2015 and Community. I know they recently came out with support for VS Code, but that's a different beast if you are a traditional C#/.Net/VS guy. From my experience with both, React is a pleasure to use, while Xamarin often had me cursing my decision to use the platform.