What are your thoughts on Godot? If you were equally experienced and invested in that would things be different?

As someone who's worked quite a bit with both, no. I have hopes for Godot but in terms of actually shipping commercially-viable games, it's not even in the same league as Unity. This comes from many things, but some of the big ones are:

* Ability to do first-party console ports

* 3D rendering fidelity and speed

* Asset store quality & quantity

* Robustness & stability - they both have tons of bugs but with Unity there is almost always a way around the bug, due to the decades of commercial games that paved the path before you.

For one quick example, Godot's physics engine is well-known to be poor, both in terms of performance and in terms of accuracy/stability. It has tons of bugs, tunneling, jittering, etc. Both the 2D and 3D physics engines in Godot are currently slated to be ripped out & replaced with external ones of higher quality (Box2D and Jolt). But currently, that hasn't happened, so one of the foundational parts of most games - physics - is guaranteed to be broken to some degree in a Godot game.

But Jolt is pretty much a drop-in replacement right now, no?

For a hack, sure. For something you're doing seriously, not so much.

Replacing the 3d engine with Jolt is on the official roadmap. If it were really a drop in replacement today, that would have already shipped.

I adore Godot and have been learning it on my own time, but it's just not there for XR stuff yet, our current project has the Vision Pro as a target, for instance, and Unity is really the only option there. Apple's native tools (Reality Composer Pro) are just abysmal.

But yes, all of my personal projects are in Godot now, and I'm planning to use it for some tooling at work, just because it's UI system is nicer than Unity's as well as it having better support for re-using editor UI components in an application.