When RC1 of .NET core was announced, we jumped on it (in spite of all the limitations that it came with) and haven't been disappointed. We've been working on a product whose pilot version handled to the tune of 40K requests in a day on a 1GB/1Core Linode box
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As far as choice of platform goes, it all comes down to a few factors for me
1. What the team is comfortable with:
This is *crucial* and in retrospect it is the biggest contributing factor
that helped us take our next product to production -- fast. If you have a
team that is comfortable with .NET then just go for it. Everything else can
be figured out later.
If you have a fair idea of what you're building out, scout the ecosystem
and see if it offers everything that you need. We more or less found
everything that we needed except a good Excel wrangling library.
Also I feel the .NET core VS Node question is skewed because comparatively, Node is a platform that has been around for much longer and has much bigger adoption.
Keeping this in mind, there will definitely be problems with .NET Core. Eg: If you're looking to reference a class library that is running with the full framework then you'll be hitting a few hurdles and stoppers.
The good part however is that it is constantly under work and we're able to actually see the performance improvements. [1][2]
The bad part however is that it is constantly under work so expect flux. [3][4]
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Experience wise, its been great working with .NET Core. Projects like VS Code make it a breeze. To me, C# has always been a well architected, beautiful language and now I'm able to write it in the way I want to -- without using a bloated IDE like Visual Studio and run it where I want to -- On cheap linux boxes without worrying about licensing costing.
For us at Logic Soft, .NET core really was a lifesaver when our next logical transition was the web and we were a .NET house shipping software on windows :)
Footnotes: [0]: http://logicsoft.co.in [1]: https://www.techempower.com/blog/2016/11/16/framework-benchm... [2]: https://github.com/aspnet/KestrelHttpServer/pull/1138 [3]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/05/23/changes-t... [4]: http://ivanz.com/2016/05/17/farewell-project-json-hello-msbu...