It's actually surprising to see the amount of negativity surrounding Godot on HN. The top comment in the thread about Godot's 3.5 release was someone talking about how Godot's feature set is "below average" compared to Unreal. I think you would be hard pressed to find any Godot user that thinks it is in the same class with a product developed by hundreds of engineers at a billion dollar company. Yet, because it has an enthusiastic user base (which is a good sign for a FOSS project), that somehow it has to compete with all solutions in its category.
To your point, it would be like comparing Blender to 3DS Max or Maya in the mid 2000s.
Here is the original comment [0] and the relevant quote:
> Godot is below average in quality compared to Unreal
Quality != featureset; I've used Godot extensively (and dabbled with Unreal) and Godot just isn't as solid a product as Unreal, and it's not a small gap either. (I fully acknowledge that Godot necessarily cannot be expected to have the same development velocity and focus that a multibillion dollar company can, but nevertheless, that doesn't really factor in very much when it comes to choosing between the two.)
There are countless gotchas and footguns in Godot (some of which are being fixed for 4.0!) that directly impede my ability to use it day-to-day. Some examples that come to mind:
* No strict typing in GDScript (type annotations aren't robust enough and lots of type errors can sneak past)
* No strict typing of node types (for example, Unity components can require the presence of component "X", and this relationship can be guaranteed since it's checked at build time.)
* No strict typing of resources/scenes: they're referenced only by string paths, and it's not possible to check types at build time.
* GDScript performance (this one's a killer; unless you resort to GDNative, scripting performance quickly becomes a serious bottleneck.) I've heard that performance is significantly improved in 4.0!
I've also encountered a number of arcane bugs (some fixable, some requiring arcane workarounds); notably, I recall a bug where there were multiple texture files with the same name (but in different directories); this worked perfectly on all platforms except for Android, where in one case only, the wrong texture was used.
Besides no strict typing, Godot also has a huge issue with string-based development. Everything is a string. I'm surprised calling GDScript functions isn't done with string literals like "function"()
Hacker News can be a pretty negative eco-chamber at times. The same post can either generate very positive or very negative comments, just months apart. Not a new phenomenon (remember the post by the Dropbox founder? "Why do I need this when I can rsync").
That said, if all the non-constructive negativity is filtered, there are often gems buried in the comment section, with genuine constructive criticism. As a neutral observer it's relatively easy to find them. If I was emotionally involved with a project, however, I'm not sure I'd read the threads.
