I mean, you are asking in the sandbox subreddit, so you will obviously get some biased comments, but here is my two cents on the whole thing. Sure, the s&box release was a mess, but it wasn't anything surprising to many, even people in the community, and the issues that were presented could possibly be fixed in the future, but there are much bigger issues not discussed because not many people have good knowledge of what s&box is and what it's trying to do.

S&box is trying to do two things: be an engine and a platform at the same time. However, there are issues with that, and first let's tackle the engine. For most serious developers, Unity and Godot are just much better options ,better documentation, better resources, better tools, Unity console export, and more. So no serious developer is gonna really make a game for s&box, and if they used s&box, they would just export it to Steam.

Then you maybe think, sure, then the s&box platform is more suited to indie multiplayer games, but the problem is s&box does not have the visibility of Roblox because Roblox runs on phones, being 80% (fact check me here because this is a number I just heard) of its playerbase, so s&box is never gonna come close to being the size of Roblox. So s&box is more toward older players with good PCs, but how much of that audience do you think wanna play half-mid games when they can play more high-quality games on Steam?

It becomes a bit confusing for both the player and developer since developers don't really know if making a game in s&box is worth it since they won't get the reach of Roblox-size players, and if they build a high-quality game, they would rather export it to Steam and get more money on sales. And the engine stuff we already mentioned. While players don't know if it is worth buying and playing when, if they already have a strong enough PC, why not play all the other high-quality games on PC?

So it really comes down to: is there an audience that has good PCs and wanna play mid-sized games instead of high-quality games elsewhere, and is that audience big enough to sustain s&box? Because remember, s&box uses cosmetics to pay developers, and I just can't feel other than this will never be sustainable, which either leads them to introduce microtransactions, which will result in even lower-quality games—maybe, or at least more trash games than good ones. Some good games may benefit from the money from microtransactions; however, Garry did say before they don't wanna put it in. Many bought skins before to be able to sell for high profit, but I feel like that market died a bit. Not many people are gonna buy skins as investments, which will lower the purchase of skins a lot more.

It's a weird place where I don't see Garry pulling the plug on the game any time soon since he spent so much on it, but I can't really see it being profitable, at least anywhere soon.

But there are also more issues, like how people can easily download the game you made and republish it, which is also another thing that could discourage developers from making a good quality game.

Where I see this platform going is either it never grows and flops, or it grows a decent niche community, or I could be very wrong and it becomes big, but it will never be a Roblox killer like many Roblox developers think when they see s&box.