My experience with titanium was really poor. Lots of silent fails with no real error output. Also I found it very limited, more limited than just opening a webview and using html5 really and hooking into it with code for the native functionality.
You must be joking. I've built several projects, for pay, using Titanium and find it to be very powerful and fast for building even complex mobile apps. The customers have been thrilled that I'm able to deliver tons of features in shorter time frames and hence lower cost.
As for error output - you just need to look at the logs in detail (and turn them up to trace) to get details for hard crashed.