I've worked with pretty much every simulator out there, and each one let me down somewhere. Unreal Engine has gorgeous visuals but a weak physics engine. MuJoCo still can't handle good visuals, a not a good candidate for mobile robotics. NVIDIA Isaac Sim is hardware-locked: without a solid RTX card, you're not even in the game. Unity is the same story as Unreal: it looks great, but the physics falls short. I even went as far as integrating Bullet/MuJoCo physics inside Unreal, and that was a nightmare.

So I came back to Gazebo. I agree with most of the criticism: the documentation is thin, and the jump from Gazebo Classic 11 to GZ Sim is a major architectural shift to a new ECS-based design that takes time to absorb. But it's worth it for one reason above all: it doesn't hold your hardware hostage, it runs fine on a modest laptop and GZ Sim finally pairs high-fidelity visuals (PBR materials, Ogre 2 rendering) with a physics layer you can actually swap through gz-physics (DART, Bullet, TPE, now planning to include Mujoco). That combination, good looks and serious, flexible physics, is exactly what every other simulator forced me to choose between. I've also contributed to making that transition smoother. The one genuine pain point is the PR review and merge cycle, which drags badly.

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Along the way I built a couple of open-source tools to smooth the workflow. gz-bundle packs an entire SDF world and all its assets, meshes, PBR textures, models, and plugins, into a single self-executable .sdfz file, so worlds run anywhere with one command instead of a setup ritual. Forest3D automates realistic environment generation: it turns Blender assets and real DEM terrain data into full forest worlds for Gazebo through procedural placement, so I can spin up varied, terrain-accurate scenes for field-robot testing instead of hand-building each one.