How can a man that wears Minnie Mouse ears be this based?
Nah, he's just high on his own farts. His analogy would make sense if software development was meaningfully like cooking but it's an engineering project. Anything engineered needs to have the costs and benefits of decisions weighed since your project has neither infinite time nor infinite financing. For something like Minecraft, yes, that needed a whole new engine because there was nothing that could do what the project was attempting. For 99+% of games out there, they are not going to be held back, reduced in scope, or crippled as a result of using a preexisting engine and they will, instead, save substantial amounts of time and money by not having to start 100% from scratch. That's like building an assembly line and deciding to design and manufacture each sensor, switch, roller, robotic arm, and so forth from nothing instead of going to companies like Fanuc, Festo, or Allen-Bradley for preexisting robotics, pneumatics, and power handling.
The biggest "blame the engine" bit I can think of is Bethesda and Gamebryo/Creation Engine, but even that isn't the engine despite what the memes suggest. If you've ever played with the GECK or Elder Scrolls Creation Kit (or had a chance to talk with some of the poor sons of bitches that have worked as programmers on BGS titles), it's very clear that it is the asinine approach to how Bethesda has assembled things under the hood that is the problem. These are decisions that would be implemented whether or not they were using a licensed game engine. For example, have you noticed that BGS games will sometimes have quests update instantly and sometimes take up to 2 seconds to register an update? It's because
every script for an active quest is set to run on a set interval whenever the game is not paused. To keep the game from slowing to a crawl, most scripts in game (backed up by recommendations on the GECK/ESCK wikis) are set with 2 second run intervals to spread out the load. This is why there's that weird variability in timing for certain types of quest events. This is not a Gamebryo problem but a design problem and it's just the tip of the iceberg for why Bethesda games are the sloppy, kludgy technical messes that they are.
tl;dr Notch is a Scandinavian auteur like Lars von Trier and he has the same level of over-inflated sense of self-worth and ego that the director has.
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