No disagreements there. Spelunking is a great word for it, but spelunking is a requirement for most "deep" unreal engine development. On the other hand, its incredibly empowering to switch your ide to build UnrealBuildTool, and put "My project Development Win64" as the arguments and be able to debug the build tool there and then to see what it's actually doing.
That’s true. I should give it a go again now that Rider is available. It’s been a huge QoL improvement in the rest of my Unreal/Unity development work.
