Is there any good engine made for programmers? A kind of "bootstrap" of video games?
There's so many starter kits out there, for Unity at least, even for older platforms such as Ogre3D and SDL, that I think the highest barrier of entry for any programmer is the fun idea.
I find it does enough for you that you can jump right in to programming your actual game, while giving you access to the nitty gritty if you want it.
Unity isn't exactly perfect either, there's just confusion about which version to start out on but the one that has the most amount of tutorials and userbase seems to be the answer.
Absolutely correct that UE C++ is daunting. You just have way too much responsibility and you absolutely need experience with C++. It also takes more developers who are harder to find compared to Unity devs.
Unreal Engine really isn't it for indie or small studios. It just takes so much longer to make something on it, and you almost certainly end up working with C++ to fix performance issues, debugging, etc.
For large studios especially film studios using it to create 3D environments? It's perfect and those are UE's target market since they are guaranteed to have revenue income that can pay UE since it works on percentage of revenue generated and small studios, indie devs, the risk is far greater.
This symmetric financial incentives mean the indie, small studios are always sidelined as they don't pay the bills. That's where Unity really shines.
After seeing how far unreal had come and downloading it to test it out I finished up the consulting project I was on I started looking into making VR games.
Initially I messed around with some other projects too but for maybe the last 5 or 6 months I've been working on pretty much just this.
It was a lot to learn but once you understand the core concepts it does not seem that different to me that normal software development.
I'm currently learning how to use c++ instead of blueprints. Each thing I learn makes the engine seem easier and like any other piece of software. There is some cruft but less than you might expect.
I watched a bunch of courses and videos but looking back I think the best place to start would have been the docs. For unreal and blender. They took me a while to work through and I had to stop and Google terms constantly but they were really helpful for understanding some of the basic mental models and terminology in the space.