I felt the exact same way until I tried Hazelight's AngelScript UE fork. It is amazing, it brings the developer experience and iteration speed to Unity levels. They even made a VSCode plugin for it. Cannot recommend enough
Any thoughts on Verse? I’m not experienced with Unreal or in the ecosystem, but it looked like it might be too foreign to me. But Tim Sweeney is no dummy, so it’s probably good and just requires some effort if you’re not already a functional programming nerd?