The with hiring out new devs (contractors) for Engine work…is they are brand spanking new and it takes awhile to get them acquainted with all the systems (no matter what their experience level may be). Then they’ll make mistakes. For games… that can be a bit more forgiving (bugs can be funny as long as it’s not game-breaking)… but for Engine Tech…they should be having the majority of their experienced engineers focused on the Engine, rather than a Game…
But that’s not really how we (at least publicly) are seeing it. Most, if not all their experienced engineers are working on Fortnite right now. Some are pulling double-duty doing some Engine Tasks (unless git commits are just done by leads after overviewing, then maybe not)
But really, it’s easy to see how much the Engine has suffered over the past year(s) due to no real commitment/focus to the engine. Was 4.10 really the only Stable Release? IIRC, we were supposed to have them every 5 Major Versions. But 4.15 did not get that treatment. 4.18/4.19 seemed like they should have been, but they introduced a lot of bugs (which seem to take a long time now to get hotfixed, so much so, they abandoned 4.18’s issues outright)
Is it possible we’ll see some sort of Holy Grail in the form of 4.20? Will it be lit enough to be the most stable release since 4.10?