I'm in the same boat as the author; I cut my teeth on a hand-me-down 2005 eMac, then a hand-me-down 2008 Macbook, before finally getting my own 2011 iMac. I think this is overly harsh on Chromebooks given they belong to the cheaper end of the market - you can still put linux on them and go for gold, you're just going to hit earlier resource limits.

I think when you're younger and building an aptitude for computers, it's the limitations of what you have that drive an off-the-shelf challenge: doing what you can with what you've got. That can vary from just trying to play the same video games as your friends (love what /r/lowendgaming does), usage restrictions (e.g locked down school issued laptops) or running professional tooling (very slowly) just like the author.

When IT caught my interest, I did all of the above - on Mac, Windows and Linux, on completely garbage machines. The Macbook Neo is an awesome machine for it's cost/value, but I don't think it's hugely special in the respect described beyond making more power available at a more accessible price point.

> Also when creating things with nodes, you have to go back and forth between node GUI and code.

> All of the mainstream engines have a monolithic game editor. It doesn't matter how many features you use from it, you still have to wait 10 minutes for all of them to load in.

These notes really resonated; the debug loop even with Godot, using minimal fancy features, felt a lot slower than other contexts I've programmed in. Multiple editors working around a single data file spec is also a cool idea! In finding that a unified IDE makes it easier for different developers to create merge conflicts, I could see having editors of a more specific purpose may also help developers of different roles limit the scope and nature of their changes. Keen to see how the engine progresses!

> Sure, the tech stack might be exciting. Or the product may be compelling. The work-life balance may be good. But I promise you that the biggest reason is still money.

I was always under the impression that for a paid job, the reason of money is assumed. Companies want to hear your other reasons - to show you are at least trying to appreciate what they're about aside from making money. Was the question ever being asked to find the main reason?

In what might be a bit of a cursed, uninformed thought - but I'd like to see what happens if each player's perspective could be altered individually. Would it be possible for players to have unique camera perspectives when split, and then reorient to the same perspective when within a given distance to transition to single screen?

From memory (as I have been unable to find a demo video), the LEGO series had some interesting approaches to dealing with this. IIRC LEGO Marvel Super Heroes gave players control of their camera when in the open world, so in Dynamic Splitscreen mode there was a little fade transition when recombining cameras to single screen. Pretty sure there was a little delay too so it wouldn't recombine unnecessarily, and it was typically a more annoying point of the splitscreen as the dividing line would pivot more dramatically - something the raytraced approach would definitely improve!