No. There is no trade off. This game is a VN, this is a very simple genre, I could reimplement the engine easily in C++ and Lua and I do not consider myself a superstar. And I do not need to be Gordon Ramsey to be able to tell I've been given a plate of shit.

The C++ part is a complete strawman, nowhere did I say that everyone must now use C++ only. Unity, Unreal, Python, Electron, et al are not the problem here, the problem is bad practices and laziness. I ran simple and free 3D Unity games like The Very Organized Thief on that years old integrated GPU, today I can't run a 2D VN I actually paid for and that does nothing graphically stunning on a much newer and more powerful integrated GPU. Because reasons. Loading assets of the entire game all at once in a blocking way and storing them in loose files instead of packing and compressing them is not generating ROI or saving time - it's plain dumb and lazy. This is not okay in my book and if it is in yours then you are part of the problem. If you opened a hundred files one a time in C++ the result would exactly be the same and a fix is to actually test it and improve it, not decide it's good enough on your SSD and slap a '1.0 Gold' label onto that build.

It's absolutely not polished either. If you have watched the video you'd know about how "voice acting" amounts to c.a. 70 seconds of gasps and hellos, how translations support and control support has been cut and there is 0 ETA on them, how the developer ignored my questions about these issues, how new game plus is semi-broken, how lacking the VN features are (not even a dialogue history) and how clicking too fast can break the dialogue system (in a VN, for crying out loud, a genre that you do nothing in but click through dialogues). There are also a few writing mistakes that slipped through.

The game went through Square Enix QA (via their indie program) for months like that and took 2 years and about 200 000 euros to develop. There is still no promised Mac build despite them using a "portable, no code, HTML5" engine. I will not buy any excuses at this point, especially after being radio silenced while the developers take time to make cute replies to positive Steam reviews, and I will advise everyone to stay away from that borderline dysfunctional developer.

I have made plenty of sacrifices in the past, running really heavy IDEs on even my old laptop because features they provided me with justified the costs and the lag I experienced compared to vim, Notepad++, etc. When I pay for a product (or even get one for free) and it does less, does it worse and also uses more resources - that's not justifiable, that's bullshit and needs to be called out and stop. Clearly not everyone is cut out for tech related works and between all open and free tools the doors to tech world are open wider than they ever were, plenty wide to require at least a bit of decorum from everyone who gets in, not require users with 3-7 year old machines that are in completely working order to throw them out.

I can also forgive actual indie developers (that do not have a pile of cash and a corporate supporter taking care of promotion and "QA") a lot but there is absolutely 0 excuses for these guys or for Sony to get SQL injected, Equifax to handle people data in the way they did, TP-Link to misuse public NTP servers, IoT devices and drones to have their ports wide open, etc. zero (greed, sloths and other cardinal sins are not valid reasons).