Developer Economics

They'll hire you, exploit you, and then fire you when the funding dries up. Your "customers" will whine endlessly about every change you make, and every change you don't, and then cry out at having to pay more than nothing for your game. The industry mostly only has big publishing houses and captive studios left, and has bar none the very worst sort of customers you'll ever get--just go read through the user feedback on the Steam store.

Importantly this:

http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1574

And this:

http://www.fdg2013.org/program/papers/paper06_zagal_etal.pdf

And this:

http://www.developereconomics.com/mobile-gaming-dirty-secret/

I would never in a million years recommend anybody entering the industry at this point unless they are making an independent game by themselves--and even then, only as a hobby.

If you want to learn something, keep it as a hobby. It'll be a lot of fun, you'll learn a lot, and maybe you'll even get to sell your project. But don't don't don't try to make a living from it.

I don't know about "emerging", but at this point it's impossible not to mention AR/VR and machine learning. Developer Economics highlighted both in their latest report [1] - and that is also a partial answer to your second question, their free quarterly surveys are a good way to keep an eye on tech trends.

As an aside, I remain puzzled by HN's hit-and-miss deduplication. Sometimes I submit something and it's caught immediately. Then [2] happens.

[1] https://www.developereconomics.com/reports/developer-economics-state-developer-nation-q3-2016

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12317342

Not definitive, but there are a lot of good comparisons:

http://smashingboxes.com/blog/choosing-a-front-end-framework-angular-ember-react

https://www.developereconomics.com/feature-comparison-of-4-popular-js-mv-frameworks

https://www.developereconomics.com/comparison-4-popular-javascript-mv-frameworks-part-2