Welcome to the forum!
My story is not even similar to yours, but the outcome is the same: I'm a happy owner of an M235i. I used to have the legendary already E46 330i, but - after many years of happy driving - something went wrong with the SMG gearbox it had. Nobody, including BMW authorized service, was able to repair it - so regretfully, I had to selll the car. It do unfortunately happened that - at the end of 2012 - the coupe version of E9x 3-series (which would be a natural successor to my 330i) wasn't already orderable, and the 4 series was one full year to be waited for. So I did a stupid move (pushed by the dealer, who wanted to cler his stock off the 2012 production, and offered me quite a nice rebate), and bought the F10 528xi. While being a really beautiful car, it felt too large for me from the very beginning, and its downsized 4-cylinder engine (the same you considered in the 228i) was simply too weak... Two years later the 2-series arrives, so what do I do: not even having an opportunity to test drive it (the M235i were very hard to get in Poland), I sell a 2 years old F10, losing a lot of money (like all premium cars, it lost most of its value during those first 2 years), and order the M235i!
Enough said, cause having the same car you can realize how happy an owner I am
But I admit that in my case, I do regret a bit that at the time of selling my F10, I didn't know at how great price the M2 will come. I'm a power maniac, so I could use the 528xi 3-4 years instead of 2, and buy the M2 for virtually the same money as my M235i...