Ah, a disgruntled former DB user?
Believe me, I've been very close to purchasing Spine a few times, myself. Problem is, I want IK, free-form mesh deformation, etc. and those are only available in the Pro version, and that's currently $300.
I plan to use it with Defold, or possibly with other third-party Spine runtimes that don't require a Spine license to use.
I wouldn't say the Spine export doesn't work. I was able to get the "Ubbie-Mesh" model running on a Spine runtime without any hassle using the export. The "Robot-IK" model needed a few tweaks, since it uses IK and DB exports to an old (3.3) version of the Spine format. The event data not getting exported is annoying, although one could always do an export of both Spine and DB formats and just grab the event data from the DB file and add it to the Spine file. Worst case scenario, if the Spine export was completely broken, it probably wouldn't be too much trouble to write a converter from DB to Spine.
Of course, it would be nice if the DB team just fixed the export