[courseofaction]

I don't feel like an expert, but I'm a full time Unity dev with experience on non-Unity AAA projects.

There are the obvious advantages of having a pre-built editor, standard environment, fantastic build tools, and generally handling a lot of the complexity of managing a project, particularly in the early stages.

It's possible to limit your use of the engine to these time-savers, and essentially use it as a front-end for your game, however many workflows within the Unity projects make heavy use of engine-specific features which become an integral part of the game over time.

Rewriting scripts to not make use of the Unity engine's C# features isn't necessarily major challenge, depending on how reliant you are on engine-specific features. But when you've set up dozens of entities and items using Unity's animation state machine UI, laid out your levels in Unity's editor, and saved hundreds of different reusable assets as Unity-specific "prefabs", setting up all the relationships in your project which aren't determined by code would be a massive time sink.

[thelastparadise]

> when you've set up dozens of entities and items using Unity's animation state machine UI, laid out your levels in Unity's editor, and saved hundreds of different reusable assets as Unity-specific "prefabs"

Perhaps this was a mistake.

[reidrac]

Or may be not. People commit to use a tool, so why not doing it fully so you get the most benefit from it?

It makes everything harder if you want to use a tool without really using it so you can move to a different one if needed.