The journey is important, you'll probably have a hard time making it in this industry and/or burn out if you aren't deriving joy from the day to day work.
For me, not releasing my game ASAP is not an option. I'm living off of my savings. That's why I prefer other full time devs because survival mode is very different than safe mode. (I feel 10 times more alive. Not sure how others feel).
Anyways, Im mostly responding to encourage you to create your own group because there seems to be a lot of people who are in the same boat as you. I have to say, meeting up with people every week who share the same drive/passion as I do is a great experience.
I think you have the right mindset here, so you will probably be successful in actually shipping. Kudos to you. Looking for another person with that mindset for your group, I think, is the right one.
I'm not a game developer by the way, but I am doing the solo indie dev thing, as of a few months ago. I think a lot of people who are dabbling in game dev or indie dev, like the idea of one day doing something with it, but what they really enjoy is the craftsmanship of building an engine, setting up their tooling, creating a process, etc. In my opinion, that's fun, but it doesn't really get you closer to shipping code and seeing what the market likes or dislikes. No disrespect to anyone who likes that aspect, but I think it's way different from actually needing to ship a product.
So yeah, if you ended up including tinkerers in your group, I can see how that would change the nature of the conversations.
I've been researching solo game dev for decades now, and that definitely mirrors my conclusions so far.
Just keep the end goal in mind and don't reinvent the wheel, unless you desire a career in wheel engineering. While you're working on your stuff, remember that others are also working on their stuff, and a lot of useful things are shared freely and continually popping up new.
Have the courage to recycle your ideas, and the ruthlessness to streamline your development process. Going solo is all about coming to terms with your limitations, and building solutions to work around them. Maximize the impact of work you like doing, while minimizing the necessity of work you don't. Sacrifice your creative vision until only the core remains. Resist the creeping scope of scaling it up, but also keep firm in your artistic requirements. Keep your "must haves" short, solve the hard problems first, manage your expectations, and above all be stubborn enough to tread through it.
I find art to be the most limiting factor at this point. I'm not a great artist (what I can do takes a painstaking long time to finish) and it's hard to satisfy a creative vision with free art assets.
Though i am purposefully using Rust, so even if Godot did it's a bit more awkward. There are Rust libs for Godot, though i'm not entirely sold on the libs quite yet.
My basic thought process is never do anything more than once for the creative work. If i can't find a way to keep overhead obscenely low then long term i will drown in one-offs.
I think the same way with game code. A heavy emphasis on testing, integration testing, etc. I don't have the time to Q&A for all possible regressions, so i have to ensure i do everything i can to make the engine very testable.
Minimizing repeat work is my goal with everything. Also insanely stable builds, i suppose. Ie i don't want a change in an asset to break historic builds or source. My source is tied to the assets at that time. etcetc
edit: And to be clear, i'm not writing a game engine myself. I'm using Bevy atm.
As an aside, an indie developer should make a literal yakshaving game. Just because.
(extra credit for an Ultra setting which squanders GPU power on ridiculously high-fidelity fur simulation)
I also work full time and also have other hobbies, plus I really don't get motivated by the proper process of developing a series of games with growing complexity, so instead I keep designing my dream game as I'm working on it. So, I dunno if I will ever finish. But hey, if I wasn't chipping away at it I would probably just be playing more games instead, so why not?
My wife actually suggested I join some group, but I suspected the exact feelings the OP has - serious developers rightfully would not want me in a group :) Maybe there's potential in a hobby-slacker group :)
I don’t think I’m in a small minority despite the vast amounts of literature (on HN) mostly that is about the destination alone.
And that probably means I'm not a good fit for the group, but it feels dismissive to tell me that way.
While the game is my goal, i focus on the platform because i feel solo devs have a ton of overhead. I figure if i can optimize my the creative aspects of my work i will have better long term success. Point being, i am interested in this space but not in pushing X game out the door asap. I expect my first/second/third/etc games to be failures, stepping stones. I'm here for the journey. With an eye on burnout.
So i suspect my approach may not be focused enough for your group. As right not i'm working on archival and automation of creative pipelines moreso than games.