I haven’t checked 4.24 yet but I agree that the engine is getting somewhat bloated…
I installed UDK some time ago (with no intent of developing with it - just wanted to check a few things) and I was surprised how tiny it was. UE3 had a modular architecture very similar to that of UE4 but there was only a dozen of modules or so. And that was the engine that powered so many great games!
I have also checked UE-4.0.1 recently which was the very first version of UE4 from 2014. Compiling it took about 10 minutes on my machine compared to 30-40 of the most recent versions. And while it was not as stable and far not as feature rich as the most recent versions of the engine I must say it would cover about 90% of my needs as an indie developer with the notable exception being the lack of game UI system out of the box (UMG was integrated around 4.5 or so if I remember correctly)
I totally understand the direction the engine is heading to and I love the new tools it’s getting (especially the Sequencer, yay!) but I also think that Epic will have to start keeping an eye on bloating and start paying more attention to modularity at some point with better separation of “core” features (that 90% of users need) and additional features. Currently I feel like the engine becoming a bit Microsoft Word-ish where an average user would use only 10% of features. I understand that those 10% are different for each user though.