[mntmoss]

I think I can sum it up in a Yogi-Berra-ism: The game industry is very industrialized. If you work on a commercial product, most of your effort goes towards making a product, and any specific details of the game are often a small part, one in a series of checklist features. And it's easy to dismiss assets when working on a little graphics demo, but the assets often take as much or more design insight than the code(which for most gameplay behaviors tends to boil down to finite state logic, timers, and lookup tables). What you most often get paid for as an industry employee is to churn out assets and simple behavioral scripts in quantity, so even though there are interesting problems at the top end of the field, you are probably not working on them for most production cycles, or only working on them for a short period.

As such, it's easy to tinker on a game and hyperfocus on a small aspect, but a different story to finish one in the way that most commercial games feel finished, both as software and in terms of filling in the blanks.