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

[Maximum-Dev]

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.

It’s not about what we have. Yes, if we look at what we have, we have more than many others. But it’s about what we don’t have, and more specifically, what we really need and we don’t have. It’s like UE4 has a thousand features that I don’t need in my daily work at all.