[barrysteve]

I've used UE4 for years and the Blueprints system doesn't save you much. Those abstractions are bricks, made for building brick houses. If you want to build something made out of anything other than brick, you're back to custom HLSL nodes and better off programming your shader somewhere else.

Blueprints are nicer for known problems, they are a better glue for old knowledge, but when you want to do something custom or new, you're out of luck.

This is the same problem with all programming, you can't make something specific and new without doing an engine teardown and rebuilding it. All the parts are terminally interconnected and always will be.

At the end of the day, UE4/5 is a landing pad for all the work you make in other tools. I agree web dev is no fun though.