[dleslie]

Yep, as a fellow game developer (programmer) I had similar concerns... Until recently.

Unity had the issue of the high skill floor of creating meshes for scenes until recently. You can now build reasonable looking unity scenes using a process akin to Hammer and QERadiant; albeit still inferior to those, IMHO.

There's also the resurgence of interest in crunchy arcade shooters, using classic engines no less, which is drawing attention to tools like DoomBuilder and TrenchBroom.

Annnd VR tools are making complex mesh building a lot more accessible by making it a lot more intuitive.

[mosfetarium]

There's definitely been improvements in level editors for existing engines. Hell, if you want to use those old editors, there are even plugins like HammUEr, to use Hammer with Unreal 4 and Qodot to use editors like TrenchBroom with Godot.

But I will say there was something particularly special about level editors coming with the greatest games of the day back in the 90s and early 2000s. Not only was this extremely accessible as it meant you could just learn level design, and not the rest of game development, but it meant you got to learn level design for your favourite games, something particularly enticing to young people. You also got a bit of a built-in audience.