I’ve been working with unreal for around 4 years now, mostly as a TA, almost exclusively with blueprints except some simple libraries.
Regarding crashes, I can say that they are super common, even non-code-related, just renaming an asset can sometimes cause a weird crash. But that’s an issue with most 3d/2d software so can’t complain too much about that, save save save!
I consider myself an avid learner, I am pretty comfortable in multiple DCC, render engines, a bit of python, JS, C#, but personally, I had a really hard time understanding the C++ API in UE4, and that, combined with incredibly slow compile times, has kept me away from diving in deeper and is making me consider other options as the main engine.
To make things worse, this year I was developing an iOS app using UE4, and encountered some very weird problems, for example before 4.27, packaging a project using file-package-ios would result in a package that would not be accepted by the app store, so had to use project launcher. After 4.27, my projects could not be packaged anymore using the project launcher as it would result in build errors but worked fine using the file-package-ios.
The worst experience came from trying to compile the engine from source, to be able to add some extra iOS functionality. Even something “simple” as downloading the project from Github and compiling it, would result in errors on 1 computer, but work on another. Then after adding the new code, would work when compiling on windows, but not on Mac, or vice-versa. Some errors were permission-related, but some were just very hard to track down, even some other people experienced the same issues and never solved them on forums or other places.
I understand that it’s a very complex engine, and it’s free, but it’s a nightmare experience for small developers.