I understand where you come from. I managed to find a way to make MetaHumans usable but after changes in my project it’s kinda useless now because I’m going all into a pretty stylized comic-like design and Metahumans since its conception it’s just too realistic to what I want to achieve. So instead of using pre-made characters, it’s better to learn how to design one from a scratch (or a base) to meet the style one wants to get.
The advantage I find in pre-made stuff (that counts character creators, marketplace assets, and stuff like that) is that you save time, ONLY if that fits your project. But what I see in Epic is that most of their prioritization over “free stuff” and loads of assets circles around a very specific, rather realistic style of models and characters, and forgets about things like what you said, tutorials on how to achieve for their Engine X custom model/stylization/whatever. There are some good tutorials like the outlines and celshading ones (back when UE4 was the main engine), but not much for the new features there are appearing in UE5.
For example, the new video of MetaHuman animator features Hellblade actress testing it. I see the model, and I see a highly plausible recreation of the actress. But in my experience, I was incapable of making a MetaHuman with the eye size of that actress (which is to say, she has pretty big eyes heh). Literally one of the main things people complain about MHs are the small eyes issues (and lack of hair cards). So, how can it be that there are not tutorials around this? Even if it is one that mixes other software with theirs (e.g. “How to MH edit eyes in Blender”), but nope.