Hi @Alex_8BitSkull, I’m not the person you addressed, but I can sympathize with his viewpoint a bit, so I’ll provide my perspective here as well.
First, I like Defold a lot, and have invested a lot of time and effort into it. In particular, it’s thanks to Defold and its simple render script that I’ve been able to learn a lot about 3D rendering and do some pretty interesting things. I’m a very code-oriented developer, so I never took to bigger engines like Godot or Unity, and my only other experience here is in Java frameworks like LibGDX and JMonkeyEngine. For me, Defold has been a nice middle-ground between those extremes, and I’ve accomplished more with it than any other engine / framework so far.
Regarding the engine not having many built-in things, and needing to install a lot of extensions – this can be a red flag for some developers. This has been discussed here before, but the small core + extensions approach can lead to fragmentation of the ecosystem and lots of unmaintained / half-finished extensions that can be hard to sift through. For example, a new developer who wants 3D graphics will probably have a hard time deciding which extension will best suit their needs, and will probably be disappointed if they (quite reasonably) want features like SSAO and basic post-processing filters too.
Regarding @ross.grams comment about fanboys – when new users ask / complain about missing features, I’ve felt that some of Defold’s more ardent supporters often respond in a way that comes across like “You don’t really need this feature! Or you can build it yourself! Only dummies would want this to be built in! You’re not a dummy, are you?” Of course no one literally says this, but sometimes this is the vibe that comes across on Discord and in the forums. And when I read such comments, I usually think, hey, it’s okay to just admit that Defold’s approach isn’t for everyone or every situation, and that some devs and projects might truly be better served by Godot / Unity/ whatever.
Having said all that, I want to reiterate that I do enjoy using Defold, and am pretty committed to it at this point (and your own work, @Alex_8BitSkull, is one of the things that gives me confidence in the engine, to no small extent). I realize that the engine maintainers have limited resources and can only focus on so many things at once, and they’ve been pretty responsive whenever I’ve had a specific issue. Given all the improvements to Defold over the last couple years, I’m optimistic that there’ll continue to be good things coming down the pipeline.
= done, 
= in progress):
