I’ve been around for 10+ years working with Unreal, mostly in AAA. Not sure how not being super active in the forums equate with my experience with the engine though.
All your complaining sounds a lot like you expect things to work automatically and for you without effort. If you think other engines do that and have for years, then why are you even using Unreal? You’re just not making any sense.
I’ve optimized content and scenes for bunch of big AAA games and I wouldn’t say everything magically works -you really have to know what things to do to get the most out of the engine, and there are hundreds if not thousands of values/parameters/settings to tweak-, but you can optimize scenes just fine if you know what you’re doing, probably with some compromise, sure, but you can.
I stand for what I said before; if you can’t optimize a game like a AAA studio can, just aim lower and be thankful you didn’t have to build your own engine from scratch.