> low happiness career for a risky enterprise that will likely not work out.
well if you phrase it like that, then you are already in your mindset set out for failure.
I agree with investing in index funds. It's the safest (long term!) investment. If you want some risk (due to market cycles), but higher reward, invest in the S&P 500. If you want a less riskier approach, invest in MSCI World.
Ionic 2 is a very promising hybrid approach. It's still in beta but should be out of it soon (better wait until it's released). The current beta version is quite fast. It has lots of components which are beautiful and has great support for ios, android and windows phone. It's JS (angular2) and html based.