Everyone is going to give different weights to the various rules and criteria for judging demos. In a community that strives for pushing boundaries, these existential debates are a staple. It was assembly vs C/C++, it was pixel art vs Photoshop, mouse vs Wacoms, chips vs raw CPU, MODs vs MP3, soft vs hardware rendering, party version vs polished release, handcoded vs demo engines, secrecy vs opensourcing, compatible vs "runs-on-my-machine", design vs tech, closed groups vs collaborations, fully self-contained vs using system assets like fonts... That's healthy.

I personally value both pacing and merit. I love demos where I ask myself "how did they do that!?", and I love demos where I forget to ask that question while I'm watching them. This one, I found rather uninspired, and obviously very weak in the merit department. It clearly does not deserve a 2nd place; there's just too little of value that the authors brought to the table. In fact, their biggest contribution may be to open the door for other sceners to use UE4 for great things.

My knee-jerk reaction when I found out about the engine was to be upset, but when I thought about it, it's not really any different than all the groups do at this level...it's just that the engine is well known.

I'm more interested in the scene's artistic growth these days anyways...art in real-time, hyper constraints, etc.

In my opinion, a demo, in addition to artistic expression, is a showcase of the technical skill of its creators.

Using a pre-built engine is not quite up to the standard I would normally expect to see.

However, an argument could be made that the Unreal Engine itself is a platform (like the C64, PC, Windows, etc.), and pushing that platform's boundaries is keeping with the spirit of the demoscene.

If we restrict one from using something like Unreal, do we restrict also the use of something like OpenGL or DirectX? Or Windows/Linux itself? There are a lot of layers of abstraction we can remove.

The best news to come from all of this is that the scene is engaged in this kind of self-defining discussion. It makes me really feel good knowing it's growing as an art movement.

Quite an existential question. All but the most extreme such efforts leverage some code from another source. Few people write bare-metal software renderers. I've been mulling over this philosophical question since the days of "demo" code on the IBM 5150 (the quintessential original "PC") using BIOS calls to draw pixels. If you can use BIOS, X11, GPUs, etc then where's the line prohibiting use of Unreal 4?