Glad you understand, but it’s just an infinite slur of things that piled up over several projects.
The reason I use an engine is that I suck at the rendering pipeline, instead, I’m almost always stuck having to fix the rendering pipeline for it to do what I need, which like in your example should just be native.
CryEngine is a lot of hands on.
Not dying, but also taxed by covid like anything else. We are all tired of the current situation of things. Even if some of us are prospering (I seriously have more work than I can handle).
IT (Cryengine) can work great.
Crysis is still used as a benchmark after-all.
The problem is that most of those transitions and LOD baking have to happen on your own.
That’s why games like Kingdom Come Deliverance (made by people who DGAF) have LODs that pop like popcorn mid cooking.
That said, I picked CryEngine because of my historical reconstruction requirements fitting in to the base features I found when testing. Not because the engine is great, or anything else. It just looks way better than unreal when properly built, the PBR pipeline does decent metals. Character skin is a little plastic like maybe toonish. But it’s still better overall for my needs.
IF you project is serious, don’t look at the most recent releases, look at stuff pre-covid. UE4 .18 perhaps if you need to leverage landscapes (that should be before they made the change to the LOD distance). Same for Unity or just about any other engine.
Test/Compare to either the latest or the one prior.
Don’t discount Unity either. Yea the rendering pipeline is also a mess, but at least posting in their forums developers may actually answer to your problem. As opposed to here, where developers come on to deliver the cookie cutter response that the eggheads managing stuff told them to deliver / trolling all user feedback - example: https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/epic-looking-for-your-feedback-on-the-direction-to-take-with-answerhub/