Hehehe. Kids these days. No respect for their elders.
Canleskis, I think you may be missing a couple of points here. One is you can't expect an engine developped by basically
one guy to compete against gaming megacorp-designed games. SpaceEngineer has been focusing on building a scientifically accurate universe, not really in designing stuff for a fancy game with lots of bling to wow players into buying it. Which brings us to the second point. Space Engine is quite a different beast from those examples of yours. For now, it's not even a game, strictly speaking, but a game engine still very much under developement. Even when it's finished as a game, it aims to attract a different crowd; take a stroll through the
gameplay discussions in the old forum and you'll see what I mean.
That's not what I meant by giving examples, of course a single indie developer cannot reach what a AAA developer can reach, the examples I gave were simply about the fancy interface those games have, even by not using the material design.
Secondly I know what SpaceEngine is expected to be and I'm really happy with it, though I know by experience that an average player would no be attracted by SpaceEngine because it looks very difficult. Almost everyone I tried to convince SpaceEngine was amazing told me it is boring or too difficult to be played, so they give up even though I tried my best to explain them how much potential SpaceEngine has. I've been following SpaceEngine for 3 years now and I've been playing it a lot, a very lot. I do not post really often on the forums but I read most of it, so I understand you see me as a random guy who just discovered SE and don't know there's one developer but it isn't the case and here I was just trying to give an example of why SpaceEngine lacks popularity (even though I'm sure SpaceEngineer is not aiming for that).
Quontex, I agree with you on this point, but as I said earlier this could boost SpaceEngine popularity since it is coming on Steam soon.