Yeah, I just fundamentally disagree with the approach the Godot team has taken with the project on basic stuff like this. I want the project to succeed beyond Indie, but it never will until it takes stuff like this seriously and integrates it into the engine.

Nobody but an Indie dev or hobbiest is going to want to waste time on this. There's too many other things that need done to make a game to get bogged down by this one thing.

I think water shaders are in the same situation. I can make nice looking water out of the box in Unreal Engine. But to make it interactive water takes a ton of work ontop of that depending on the scope of what you want to achieve, could even be months of work to make good looking interactive water if it includes actually height to the waves and not just normal maps. No way any serious dev team is going to want to go down the road of implementing the water shader under the hood first before they make it interactive.

They'll skip using the engine, and use something else. Unless they're a big enough team with enough resources to have an engine dev team of their own, in which case they weren't very likely to use Godot in the first place.

I don't prefer something other than Godot. I've used a number of engines now, and I use what I do bcz I have to spend an inordinate amount of extra time doing stuff in Godot that are just blocks in other engines. It's not a good use of my time as an Indie dev. I really enjoyed Godot when I first started making games, but once I got serious about making a commercial game I realized it just didn't have the features I needed. I learned about the missing features from the engine devs themselves when they wrote a post specifically discussing the missing features for AAA games. (Not that I'm trying to make a AAA game). My game is just big enough that level streaming is important for performance.