> ...if it might be worth learning tier 2 and it appears it would. 50 times faster is a huge amount.
The more important question is - do you need the extra speed? It comes at the cost of speed of development and complexity of code, as C++ is a fickle beast to partner up with.
Plenty of apps these days are written in - of all things - JavaScript. A hacky awful language designed and released upon the world from the inner bowels of Mordor. This is interpreted at run-time as well, much like AGK. And much like AppGameKit, it is no speed-demon compared to say C/C++, Rust or Go - all compiled languages really. Yet due to Angular/React frameworks hooked up to Electron run-time JS allows rather pain-free cross-platform app development using known and widely used web-technology.
And it works. And devs don't turn mysteriously hairless and shivering in angst-induced horror in a dark corner uttering again and again "I just tried to compile for ARM, I just tried to compile for ARM, I just...".
For high performance apps/games - and certainly for heavy-traffic backend infrastructure, speed is key. But in all other cases, you should offer a friendly thought to all those hardware engineers who have so kindly made modern computers so fast that we can happily waste most of their resources on rather inefficient high level languages. In the name of keeping sane, happy and meeting deadlines