marta_morena_25

Not really... All great game engines were spawned out of AAA titles. You should never try to build an engine without a set of games that stretch its limits in all directions, otherwise something will always go wrong. There isn't a single person alive who can manage the complexity of a game engine. As soon as you start splitting things up, you run into problems of distributed development. Getting this right without eating your own dog food is unlikely, at best, no matter how experienced your team is...

What makes the difference between an experienced engine developer, like CryTek and Unreal, and a hobbyist or a company who does it for the first time, is mostly that while both of them will definitely build a game with the engine while creating the engine, the experienced team will actually produce a re-usable, well designed engine, while the inexperienced team will produce a hunk of junk that doesn't fit together and doesn't extend past the game they were trying to develop.

US universities are always amusing to me. You pay about 100 times more than for a German university and end up with an education where you have trouble understanding the content they teach in Germany after graduation, unless you come from an elite university. But hey, it's really easy to find Standford equivalents in Germany as long as you search for a good university for your major, instead of just searching for a university. Of course it doesn't come with the prestige and the network, but honestly is that really worth a quarter million dollars? In the end, if you are smart and willing to learn, the only thing you really get from US elite university is prestige and better equipment and research opportunities. However, all of that isn't really relevant for a whole lot of people.

I would say its a measure of maturity as a developer if you have no interest in touching something that has no use and is 99% hype. I would not have a problem of working on a useful blockchain in my job, however it remains to be seen if there is such a thing.

Blockchain is like a solution without a problem. The only thing that can be done with blockchain that can't be done without (i.e. decentralization) is something that mostly has no application in the real world. And there is no need for it because the technology for that exists since over 2000 years. If it was needed, someone would have done it already long ago.

But who knows, perhaps at some point in the future a use case will emerge.