I'd love to hear a direct response, but here's[1] a quote from a few years ago (specifically mentioned Unity, not UE4, but I assume the sentiment is the same).
I can't find it, but I was also reading an article a few days ago about why that person would choose to write their own engine over a third-party one. In that article (maybe it was the comments), they specifically called out the game mechanics of the The Witness and Braid as example of things traditional engines don't do very well.
That article is actually why I chose to use the word 'expressive' in my question!
"..when I'm making these games, they're not just commercial products. They're expressive works that we're working very hard to make, and we want them to have as long of a lifetime as possible. So I would like this game to be relevant 20 years from now, 40 years from now. How do you do that? Well, you don't necessarily do that by building it on top of a very complicated system, that you don't own, that somebody else will cease to support at some point in the future."
Given that UE4 is open source I wonder if he still has the same sentiment.
As someone that has been working on a game in UE4 for 2.5 years the idea of rolling and supporting my own engine/tools is dizzying.
I can't find it, but I was also reading an article a few days ago about why that person would choose to write their own engine over a third-party one. In that article (maybe it was the comments), they specifically called out the game mechanics of the The Witness and Braid as example of things traditional engines don't do very well.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/282l0k/jonathan_blow...