I hope Godot/Bevy do well but there's a kernel of truth there as well. It was not uncommon for us to make significant changes to licensed engines to meet the ne

I hope Godot/Bevy do well but there's a kernel of truth there as well. It was not uncommon for us to make significant changes to licensed engines to meet the needs of the game style/design. UE3 for instance was pretty awful for open world titles(gears was quite a rails shooter and the engine reflected that), there's a number of titles that took the renderer and re-did many of the major game systems. Once you make changes like that upleveling is a serious challenge. We had one dev who's responsibility was to pull latest, spend about a month getting to to compile, another 1-2 months fixing all the issues, checking it in only to them spend another 2 months fixing all the cases that weren't tested. With a ~6mo uplevel cadence it was just enough time to finish it in order to start the next uplevel. Once you've gone through that internal engines start to look appealing(although they have their own pitfalls, I.E. heavy dependency on MAX/Maya for editor support and other "fun" bits).