A moral of the story is: if you do game, developing your own game engine is a wrong business decision in the harshest sense of business decision making, that will bury your credibility and make your projects stagnate and never live up to the expectation.
Not entirely true, having worked with various rendering/simulation engines over the years they all tend to impose restrictions or have limits of one sort or another. Sometimes, developing your own engine is the ONLY option to achieve the desired technical scope of a given project.
ED has had a daunting (if not insane) level of scope from the day of inception, certainly far greater in scope than ANY AAA developer or publisher would consider attempting. FD have been doing the right thing in the main, eating the proverbial elephant one bite at a time. The level of scope means that ALOT of people will find things lacking in one area or another probably for many years to come, but that does not mean the product is bad nor that FD have made any wrong decisions.
