I love the engine but why is it so bare bones?

[iniside]

@Maximum-Dev;672460

True.
I think UE4 is the only engine out there without spline decals, road tool, physical sun, ToD system, any sort of weather system, etc. There are always “workarounds” and “to-it-yourself”, which is completely invalid statements if you ask me. Majority of people are happy with UE4, there is only a short list of things left to do until is happy with UE4, but it doesn’t seem like Epic will hear us there because in the end their own needs is a priority to our needs.

While I agree those system would nice to have, I still stand by that we need more fundamental (architectural) changes to engine.
Notably multithreading on UObjects (CPUs are getting more cores, not higher performance per core), native multithreading in blueprints (something akin to .NET await, async, Task).
Then we need to have one object above Actor, and refactored component system, which will be indepedent from actor (but could be bound to new class above actor).

As side note. While there are some things missing, UE4 is still light years ahead of any close competition in terms of tooling. Lumberyard and CryEngine 5 are not even in the same league compared to Unreal.
They lack good tools for Animation for example. They don’t even have 1/4 of UE4 framework functionality, their terrain tools are subpar compared to Unreal (and that tells much, because Landscape is just old and bad at that point).
They do have advantages (ie. Lumberyard architecture is designed to be distributed if one wants it) and CryEngine 5 still excels in real time rendering.
But when summed up, Unreal still have clear advantage over any competition. In that case I’m not surprised Epic don’t really focus on external requests from community. There is no competition, so for them is better to focus on internal projects/high profile licensees.