Wow that’s a big thread and right up my alley. I too would prefer if they stopped adding new features and rather focus on improving the existing engine. However I understand throwing out new features is what makes their living. Games aren’t like an application that controls rockets. You throw something together that works, you don’t care how it looks under the hood and if you can make the game console kiddies go “wooow, ey woow ey, dat shlt is WHACK” then you have a winner. Games usually don’t have a long shelf life. You sell them for a couple of months until you churn out the sequel and that’s it. That’s the sad truth about game development and anybody who thinks otherwise is delusional.
I have recently posted that I would love to see better documentation but I know too that this is not going to happen. Because it cost manpower that could be used more profitable by adding some new features that make the list of “new features” in the next release note even more impressive (aka longer). I have seen this with other engines before I came to Unreal, so it’s nothing specific to Epic. It’s simply the shark mentality out there based on the vulture capitalist culture that fuels those companies with money. These moneybags that bankroll big companies don’t care about software engineering or good documentation. All they care about is a new release every six months that washes more money into their koffers.
Unreal is a pretty good and stable engine IF you stick to a set of functionality that is old, proven and has been fixed in the past. My application basically has static and skeletal meshes in a world, lights, uses the navigation system on a per character basis and thats it. I don’t use the fancy new stuff because I don’t even understand what it’s supposed to do. Of course that’s no option for the poor people who have to make AAA games, because those games live of the optics and not content. But they have million dollar budgets and can deal with Epic on a whole different level (I doubt they are even reading this because they probably have priority access to Epic).
My advice is: Be modest, stick to simple stuff and try to make a game with content, not with optical gimmicks, then Unreal is a real fine engine and editor system. And if you want to minimize the chances of update related bugs: Update to a new engine version only when they are working on the next version so that you get the latest patch. Let the people who want the latest gimmicks deal with the bugs.