I see this is an old thread, but I’ve had all the same frustrations the people in here are talking about. I was so happy to switch from Unity to Unreal a few months ago because of all the great tools it has, but I have been so frustrated by the materials that I’m seriously considering going back to Unity. I will have to do more programming there to get the same feature set unreal has automatically, but I know I will have complete control over how my game looks. I had some really beautiful shaders for foliage that I’ve been loathe to give up.
To be honest, I would like to just drop the deferred rendering entirely and do forward rendering for my game with custom shaders and colored shadows. Barring that, if I could at least set up my own shader models, that would fix 90% of my struggles.