Here’s another programmer unhappy with the current shader handling. It’s a pity, one of the best things invented for graphics programmers was a nearly cross-platform programming language (HSL, GSL). A clean structured and language to express complex operations with minimal code. Look at shadertoy.com to get an impression, what people can do, when they get immediate access to the graphics (haha, and sound :))
The OP has a good point, we want fast iteration, while developing graphics solution, a code change should not need minutes to compile.
And we don’t want to suddenly hit a showstopper just because the engine has artificial limits.
Having said that, Unreal4 has an amazing renderer, but needs to be extendable with plugins.