Yeah … your fine. Nothing new really being said here. It’s pretty much re-stating my opinion on why it sucks to be in the position and I have that opinion because your outline has essentially been my life over the last decade. I’m saying that UE4 even though it had its issues could take “release” branches to production and UE5 … meh it’s debatable. Quality is pretty easy to measure when you kind of live eat and breath Unreal as a career. Don’t even take my word for it … the internet including colleagues/studios I’m really close to (many who were at the last unreal fest) have gone public in some form vocal about the issues. UE5 is extremely Virtual Production heavy in its priorities and “game devs” are feeling neglected.
Nobody serious hits the “magic update” button. We usually take on the task of cherry picking fixes unless they are massive undertakings like the rhi async and chaos changes which you evaluate the risk/reward of taking the changes in bulk. Many times it is us that have contributed to the thousands of PRs awaiting acceptance. Just because something “has been the way” doesn’t mean its the best way or optimal way. If everyone followed that Montra we would never see improvement. Unfortunately it’s the people that have the courage to challenge the status quo or ask the question that make people uncomfortable that catch the pushback from the “comfort” of not changing from the known in pursuit of improvement.
My point is that getting from point A->B since UE5 has been really rough and everyone is so quick to use UE5 isn’t different than UE4 to “defend” the engine and when things are borked they are like “UE5 is not UE4” you should likely stick with UE4. Well you can’t have it both ways and I was there during the UE3 to UE4 migration. I remember it well 
I remember the studio I was with counting down the days to 4.7 → 4.8 etc. The reality is that UE4 has almost as long of a list with deprecated APIs third party tooling (google play, meta, consoles, steam sdk) that it’s been left in a state that is almost as challenging as starting with UE5 and fighting its battles. (Even if you start in 4.27-plus) [I’m not even going to open the fab migration and storefront changes pandoria’s box and what that did to anything older than UE5’s workflow.]
In reality THAT (UE3->UE4) was a much larger change and we are quickly approaching the minor version where stability was focused on with UE4. I guess as always, we will continue to take it as it comes.
Context: Being critical of something in the pursuit of improvement and constructive change is an act of love and caring. If I didn’t care … I definitely wouldn’t have waisted my time providing feedback. You offer support, advice and corrective feedback to your kids because you love them. There is no difference here really. I’m not out to bash the very thing that has fueled my career over 20 years. I’m simply concerned and stating what at this point is no longer swept under the rug … it’s the elephant in the room.