An interesting question: is it easier to motivate a learned individual that never does anything, or educate an ignorant individual that actually produces things?

If you're willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach, you can almost always do something better

At its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can't win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior.

Some cynical people think that every activity must revolve around the mighty dollar, and that anyone saying otherwise is just attempting to delude the public. I will probably never be able to convice them that that isn't always the case, but I do have the satisfaction of knowing that I live in a less dingy world than they do.

The important point is that the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. Sure, any given feature list can be implemented, given enough coding time. But in addition to coming out late, you will usually wind up with a codebase that is so fragile that new ideas that should be dead-simple wind up taking longer and longer to work into the tangled existing web. The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.

It is difficult to make good scalable use of a CPU like you can of a graphics card. You certainly don't want 'better or worse' physics or AI in your game

The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.