I've also read Game Engine Architecture, and I've written a (much less sophisticated) engine on a small team in school. Unless your goal is to make a game engine rather than a game, it would be the height of foolishness to build a game engine.
The main takeaways of the article are "have a business model" and "don't build your own engine." It adds years to the process, it's extremely difficult to get right, and the end result will be worse than using existing tools.
If your goal was to make a web app, would your first step be to write a garbage collector and a database management system? Would you invent a templating language, and build a parsing engine for it in C? Would you think it responsible to pay a web developer a salary to do those things if their goal is to just make a website? If not, then it'd pretty foolish to pay yourself to make a game engine.
You and tieTYT have convinced me. :-) But when I worked at a dev shop around 2000-2005 we did have our own app server (begun in the 90s), with its own templating language (two actually), its own "NoSQL" database, and its own scripting language (all operators and function calls in Reverse Polish Notation). And it was written in C. It was pretty fun to work on it, actually. But there's no way I'd build something like that today. And I think my desire to make games is stronger than my desire to make a game engine.
I enjoy inventing things and completing challenges. I think this trait is common among engineers. Unfortunately it doesn't make much practical sense in a lot of situations. I have entered Ludum Dare multiple times and each time I failed to finish a game because I end up spending the whole weekend writing a cool particle system or whatever. When I'm left to my own devices without planning, who knows what kind of thing I'll end up making.
The decision to invent should be made intentionally, rather than impulsively. If your goal is to have fun, then have at it. But if your goal is to launch a product, it's not prudent.
I like this analogy much better than the one above about using a web framework. This is more in line with the amount of work it would be to build a game engine.
The main takeaways of the article are "have a business model" and "don't build your own engine." It adds years to the process, it's extremely difficult to get right, and the end result will be worse than using existing tools.
If your goal was to make a web app, would your first step be to write a garbage collector and a database management system? Would you invent a templating language, and build a parsing engine for it in C? Would you think it responsible to pay a web developer a salary to do those things if their goal is to just make a website? If not, then it'd pretty foolish to pay yourself to make a game engine.