Yes, right this is one of the reasons it is not viable to use those components also using AI2 for professional solutions and use extensions.
Depends, how to distribute the apps is a decision of my customer, many do not like to distribute trough the play store and use their servers. As AIoTech we have a google play store account. But these type of apps haven't a low price, they are sold one time to the customer and he eventually has to decide how distribute the app.
If you're building professional apps, and want to make sure you don't have any problems updating in the future, you should use Android Studio. There you have better control over the interface, the code and you are not dependent on other programmers. In addition, you can do everything there for free, even what here requires paid extensions.
Your example above doesn't work at MIT at all
There are many viable alternatives to Android Studio, we used Xamarin in the past then a college of performing arts asked us to organze an undergraduated course to applicate informatics to creative work using smartphones and we propose AI2 + AI2Offline. AI2Offline makes possible organizing exams preventing internet access to find already existing solutions, you have just to cut the internet to that group of PCs. Then, trying and studyng a little bit more we realized some apps to support our internal testing needs for embedded devices and boards and then for simple user friendly IoT applications. The development speed is higher compared with more traditional development tools and also software engineering is possible. Extensions permits also to realize apps looking good and performance are also good so with some little limitations is possible to develop professional apps using AI2 compatibility with AI2Offline give us a sense of more security about service continuity, backup and so on. And last but not least curve learning is shorter. I would wish that MIT gaves an AI2 package that may be installed in a server or standalone in a PC so that it is a real copy of AI2 but actually seems it does not exist so AI2Offline actually is the "solution". We found also extension or tools based on AI2 to simplify AR and VR app development, we are testing them, basically it is AI2 supercharged with components for AR, VR and devices normally used in these applications.
You can use original AI2 locally.
AI2Offline is just an exe wrapper of artifacts build using AppInventor source with some modifications. You can also do it, without changing anything in original code to make it compatible.
Clone AI2 sources on your pc, download necessary tools like GCloud SDK, Java , Ant etc. and compile it. Now the part comes which is assembling of these artifacts in an executable file. Then you can distribute the exe file.
Yes, but then unfortunately the feature of a separate package name is still missing.
My current favorite is therefore Niotron (or Appzard) – both with at least as many functions/features as Kodular – but much closer to AI2 and (except for the missing components fully compatible with AI2).
I have the solution as you know but it is just that I'm not willing to open source it. I worked hard upon this so I feel that I should get atleast something in return.
On the other hand keeping is closed is not giving me anything as well. So it might be possible that someday I end up opening a PR. 
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Just opening a PR won't do much. There are many open PRs with various good features that have not been added and I don't think they will ever be added. But it's possible that a lot of new features will come after the merge with Kodular.
Fact.
Yes it won't be added in AI2 but then someone can merge it in their cloned/forked version.
Hmm, how then should Kodular projects be able to be imported into AI2 and updated later (for the Play Store)?
I'm talking about the collaboration with Kodular and after both platforms have merged, then AI2 must also make the packageName editable.
PackageName property will be added in AI2. There is no other way.
I do not know Niotron and Appzard, do they have an offline version also? If yes were you ble to install nd run on Windows PCs? Just curious.