This is apparently what I've been doing for about two years.

Except I still haven't gotten to the "engine" part, it's more "a bunch of wrappers around Lua and SDL2 and some random stuff that seems useful, and probably the worst ECS ever."

I actually did almost get to an actual game, though. But I was so disgusted with it that I gave up and started everything over from scratch. Mind you, everything worked fine, I just hated every thing about the code.

And this is why I am an amateur programmer and a professional box-pusher.