Agreed that Fortnite Creative 2.0 is basically a walled garden right now. It’s open for UGC which is nice, and they’re cutting us in which is nice, but it’s still a walled garden.
I think I understand why now, though. Epic’s intention is to foster the “open metaverse” as per State of Unreal '23 and multiple interviews but it’s not quite clear yet (to them or to us) how that’s going to happen.
In other words, we’re still in the early days and we’re along for the ride.
Tim Sweeney recently said “no” here when asked if NFTs would be implemented in Fortnite Creative 2.0 (original post/question since deleted). But he previously implied it was a possibility during State of Unreal '23. So, I’m taking it as a no for now.
I also saw a comment from @Dig_Squid here that one of the reasons for not giving us REST functionality is that it would allow us to “circumvent the moderation processes (for disallowed content or monetization).”
By the way, one thing to take note of that was not explicitly called out by @Dig_Squid is that because Fortnite is available across almost every platform, and each platform has varying monetization policies, I think we’ve so far ended up with the least common denominator. Were Fortnite to allow UGC to bypass these policies, they (Epic) would be liable and it could get Fortnite in hot water with the platform owners.