Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.

The situation is so much better for programmers today - a cheap used PC, a linux CD, and an internet account, and you have all the tools necessary to work your way to any level of programming skill you want to shoot for.

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.

You can prematurely optimize maintainability, flexibility, security, and robustness just like you can performance.

Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do.

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.

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