UE5 games are manifestly lower quality than games built on custom engines. Optimization is especially worse. UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps.
I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. Homogeneity of this type is horrible for customers of the gaming sector.
You're in an extreme minority. Also, unfortunately, Unreal is popular with indies who probably have (in general, relatively) more ethical staffing practices.
I don't really understand making hard and fast rules like this. Clair Obscur is one of the best and most beautiful games I've ever played. The Witcher 4 has the best graphics I've seen come from a video game. Satisfactory is nuts to look at when you see an eloquent end game build.
I also don't understand why people knee-jerk hate upscaling/fake frames so much. I can understand for fast-paced competitive multiplayer games, but for something like Clair Obscur where the ideal way to play is on the couch on a 4k TV give me all the upscaling and fake frames you can muster.
Fact remains though, that homogeneity and monoculture in tech is bad. The inability to properly render all the frames of the product I paid for, without burning thousands of dollars on hardware and emitting hundreds of watts of waste heat (and sometimes not even then!) is worse.
I refuse to believe that upscaling/framegen is a solution to any existing problem, because I remember when we didn't have to do that. I want to render ALL the frames at actual resolution. Hardware is so powerful now, there should be no excuse.
The only reason I will accept upscaling is as a power-management strategy to be employed while on battery. For upscaling to be required for any other reason represents a failure somewhere in the game development process. I won't pay for failures, especially when it costs me yet more money in hardware to run the failure-enabling technology.
I'm not talking about playing 4k@60fps native and I'm not railing against system requirements. I get modern games require modern hardware, but the ratio of what's required to run UE titles now is skewed by an order of magnitude. Simultaneously, it feels like lowend (or even midrange) optimization has been completely forgotten.
I also think that by using software like UE or Unity, you're necessarily deprioritizing a decent chunk of the "game development" process. Instead you are choosing first & foremost to participate in cottage-industry dynamics as a business strategy, with all gamedev-related decisions relegated as subordinate to your chosen business partner(s).
Additionally - and I'm getting into conspiracy theorist territory here a little bit - I believe (to an extent) that a lot of these games are made with "cutting-edge" technologies mostly as fodder to propel the industry "forward" by whatever means necessary.
By this I mean: producing the "Next Great Photorealistic Game" (which looks/plays mostly the same as the previous year's photorealistic game but requires NVIDIA's new $2,000 graphics card to run) props up AMD and NVIDIA by requiring their latest generation of hardware. It enriches Epic Games by requiring their latest engine with new features. It encourages studio consolidation because now you need an entity like Microsoft to bankroll development if you want any hope of competing in the AAA space.
Despite how bloated and ridiculous this has become, the industry continues to grind forward as these companies perpetuate and profit from the model, because there's a decent contingent of consumers who can be relied upon to purchase whatever comes out, no questions asked. And that's fair! If it's fun, then it's fun right?
But that consumer is ever-more taxed by the state of AAA gaming. And it only gets grimmer every year (as evidenced by TFA and recent happenings at Xbox).
I'm willing to believe some of this comes off as arrogant or elitist (not a gamedev, no real perspective), but these are my honest thoughts, and are how I inform the purchasing decisions I make as a consumer. Looking at where we're at and where we're going versus where we came from clashes with my ideology and makes it unfun to me personally.
EA being bought by the Saudis and people taking a hard "moral stance" to not purchase any further EA games is another example. I've got a bridge to sell you if you think you're boycotting everything (even every video game) that's making the Saudis money. I dislike EA for other reasons and their products tend to be bland but if they make a good game I'm going to reward the developers of that game so they hopefully make further good games.
And in terms of the conspiracy theory the engine is an engine. Developers choose what to implement and can tone down all the crazy new tech as much as they want. They can also write custom stacks to do things no other Unreal Engine game would do. Unreal actually scales pretty well in that regard. Current minimum specs for Satisfactory is an i5-3570K and 1650 GTX. Recommended video card is a 2070 RTX. I have a 15 year old computer sitting in a closet that can play the game fairly well. There's so many great indie titles out there that if I only had that 15 year old computer I'd be spoiled for choice. But IMO we also need bleeding edge games to move the needle forward and keep the industry exciting. I want crazy tech in my video game that makes my jaw drop like the trailers for Witcher 4 do right now. That keeps 100s of millions of people watching things like The Video Game Awards.
In terms of homogenization I see the exact opposite happening. You probably have a slew of games to play right now that all use different engines. I myself have a backlog I don't think I can get through in my lifetime that's going to grow immensely this September. There's so many games being released and they're made in so many different ways that saying there's homogenization seems strange. Right now I'm hopping between Death Stranding 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Terratech Legion, and Resident Evil Requiem. Where is the monoculture? The idea of not giving TerraTech Legion a chance simply because the devs used unreal seems wrong.
The music sounds good? I listen to the music. The book is well written? I buy the book. The game is fun? I buy the game. You could spend your whole life nit-picking reasons why X publisher is bad, X record label is the worst (and in both cases most ARE) but in the end these companies will still make ungodly amounts of money and you're just making life less enjoyable for yourself.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "baseline", but the most recent UE5 game I've played that pretty consistently gets better than your "basic target" is The Last Caretaker (TLC). For me, it always did better than your target in the starting area, through to the point where you embark on your main quest. Prior to that, I played a whole lot of Satisfactory, which ran much, much better than TLC.
I run without AA, "upscaling", or frame hallucination. I'm using a Radeon RX 9070 on Linux, and spent most of my Satisfactory playtime with a Radeon 5700 XT.
The FSR/DLSS upscalers are typically superior to TSAA and are a reasonable replacement.
A lot of the UE tech is built around the assumption of TAA though.
UE5 is just an evolution of UE4 and the early adopters suffer from being early adopters. Beyond that there is a skill issue in studios shipping less than ideal performances on time constraints.
UE5 is a marvel of modern technology from all angles.