I like Flutter a lot, but I'm not a fan of Dart. It's a false friend, it makes you believe it's simple and mostly a copy of your favorite language, but once you start to dig a little deeper it feels like something bolted on, hacky, not designed.
I come from the .net world which is the exact opposite: C# is a superb language but every UI framework MS has ever produced is sub par. Now if I could get Flutter with C# I would be a happy man.
There's too much syntactic sugar for my taste to the point it gets diabetic.
Callable classes really? For example you can write MyClass()();
Underscore to mark a variable or a function private, but you can still use an underscore to declare a variable inside a function so it muddles the comprehension. Are we going to lose some precious milliseconds if we have to write private in front of a variable?
There's also the need to use buildrunner for almost everything since the language wasn't thought out for modern use cases. It works, but this is very inelegant IMHO. When I peak at the generated code I don't feel fluent in Dart quite the opposite.
Then there's the ultra strict linter that won't let me add an empty new line where I want. The resulting code is very compact and is harder to read.
Firebase is not required, but it is the easiest way to get started. We also support 3rd party API integrations, so that users are free to use whatever backend they prefer.
Think of it this way, where Android has every view as stateful or stateless, instead in Flutter it's broken up into Stateful widgets and stateless widgets.
The only increase in time is that in the data binding side as it's not prettied up with libraries that automate that side.
I looked over the video. It is nice to see a compressed video, but it was still hard to understand what to pay attention to inside a 20 minute video. It would be great if you added callouts to the important moments so people could easily jump to the important items.
Is Firebase a requirement? I tried to create a sample app and was immediately told I needed to setup Firebase. I didn't see a way to skip that step, but perhaps it is because I used a sample template? I would prefer to use GraphQL as a backend, and am not sure if the full Firebase stack (auth, storage, realtime) are used, or if you can swap pieces in and out when desired.
Congratulations on your launch!