Lighting isn’t particularly what this is about. It’s about maintaining balance between between both worlds instead of going all out on one side only. Epic isn’t the only company implementing VR features one after another, there’s nothing wrong with going the VR route, but Epic is the only company leaving most of the base broken while they’re working on futuristic VR features hence while people don’t necessarily hate VR, they do see it being unnecessary if the basic needs of a game engine are still missing. I still can’t digest that Subsurface Scattering is intentionally left broken, along with many other issues because VR the the future. The things they’ve been doing lately, as you mentioned in your post, is collectively a form of declaring the end of support for game development.