Don't get me wrong, Sails might be very good for prototyping something, but I could recommend it only if your only goal was to prototype something.
I do have quite a few other issues with sails and waterline (ORM). Waterline provided lifecycle hooks, but limited their power and had poor documentation on extending them. Same for sails core itself, it had hooks for writing modules and extensions, but no one outside of the core team knew well how to use them. As for migrations I ended up doing all of my own migrations with knex, I'd love to see knex or sequelize be the core of a new ORM, rather than a quickly cobbled together sql module.
Trails has promised something better on a lot of these fronts through modularity, I hope they deliver.
We also owe Kevin Burke from Shyp a big thank you for drawing our attention to the SEO problem in the first place. Regardless of where Shyp goes with their tech stack long term, it has been immensely helpful to learn from Kevin's experiences using the framework there. Those lessons have already impacted the direction of Sails, and will continue to influence its future development.
On the subject of documentation, I wanted to share two other resources from 2015, in case either of them might be helpful for you: The first is a free Sails course on Platzi (https://courses.platzi.com/courses/develop-apps-sails-js/). It covers best practices for authentication, blueprints vs. custom actions, and multi-instance deployment to Heroku, and contains some great Q&A. The second is "Sails.js in Action" (https://www.manning.com/books/sails-js-in-action), a Manning book about Sails written by Irl Nathan (creator of Sailscasts) and myself. It is set to be published this Spring.
Finally re: the next generation of Sailscasts-- I don't want to speak for Irl there, but I should point out that there are 6 episodes of the second series of tutorials available (https://github.com/irlnathan/activityoverlord20). You can also see the final example app that Irl and I worked on together which includes a reference implementation of present/idle/away/offline status, user login, and chat here: https://github.com/balderdashy/activity-overlord-2-preview