I don't know what you mean by C being extreme .. for me, its not extreme at all, and rather I find working in C to be a comfortable, rewarding experience pretty much 100% of the time. But being able to extend beyond the scope of a static C application, and instead using C as the library/foundation for functionality that is exploited in Lua, is what I'm talking about. Bascially, you can have 'vanilla' Lua - /usr/bin/lua - or you can have "branded Lua" where, by branding, I mean - you add your own flair as you desire, to the Lua VM, using C (or C++).
MonoTouch/MonoDroid are not in my area of interest, since I prefer to have full sources available for everything, and I see no reason to buy such a tool when, with Lua+C/C++ I can just as easily build it myself ..
