I think there should be a small distinction between AAA and indie game development. Not all indie games need the level of specialization and optimization that A

I think there should be a small distinction between AAA and indie game development. Not all indie games need the level of specialization and optimization that AAA's do, and so they can get away with more reusable abstractions that let you move faster. But I've seen the rationale that games require too much optimization by a few indie devs as to why higher-level abstractions aren't used (not all, of course, and in some cases it's true), and that's where I think some indies that think in terms of reusable abstractions can gain an edge. It's a culturally held belief that I think sometimes gets adopted by new devs who then won't end up spending the time learning the abstractions. I'm no design pattern purist by any stretch, but you can often find ways of cutting corners while still keeping things abstract enough to be reusable. Documenting goes a long way towards that too, as does a culture of automated testing, and a better package manager with dependencies.