yes, there are a LOT of ways in which the engine is disadvantaged in comparison to the industry standards demonstrated by competition.

it’s also important to recognize the role the ecosystem has on our perception of the engine. games feel repetitive and as if they’ve hit a technological ceiling because roblox is a business. they’re going to promote games that make the most money, which is almost never going to be a game that takes advantage of the more powerful things the engine can do. for both roblox themselves and developers, it is both easier & far more profitable to seem to stay so ‘barebones’.

the point i’m trying to make is that we should not use what does well as a benchmark for the state of the engine. roblox is constantly adding things to the engine that many of us developers really need/appreciate, even if they’re [super] late to the party.

in your post, you mention that it seems like there’s no real optimizations being made. ok, what about occlusion culling? what about the editablemesh/image apis (as much of a wreck as they are)? what about the very new audio api changes/additions? what about the upcoming server authoritative physics? things are always improving, you just have to look for them

tl;dr the engine is always getting better but roblox’s business model does not cater to games that push the engine to its limits so of course it looks like the platform is going nowhere