What's the appeal of Eternity Engine?

I think it might be a David and Goliath situation. GZDoom is super popular, associated with a lot of drama and led by EEEVIL Graf Zahl from the foreign lands of zdoom.org. Of course some people will root for this drama-free (?) underdog from Doomworld, their homeland.

It's developed by Doomworld mainstays (edit: unlike all other advanced ports whose devs mainly hang out on zdoom) which I guess gives it an appeal if you're one as well. If my friend made some app or something, I'd use it even if better ones were available.

Take a walk bro

Isn't "Why pick X" pretty much the same as "What would you choose X for"?
Also, dmslr asked a question lol, he didn't answer it in a nonsensical way, he isn't supposed to say something.
And speaking of being bullied if upset about a mapset only requiring EE, (sorry this is the second time saying this) but it is probably because some of the mods took part in its development, and DW mods are never okay with something that doesn't go their way.

I'm not very invested in this issue so what I'm saying might be common knowledge. I could also be making stuff up from fuzzy memory. Not sure. I feel like I need to qualify this post this way because people who care about this 'problem' care way too much to the point where I think it hurts the players.

I think I recall some people having some problems with Graf Zahl not being very responsive to bug reports related to vanilla emulation. The reasoning being that GZDoom is a largely user friendly source port that corrects known vanilla bugs. Meanwhile projects like BTSX makes extensive use of vanilla doom's bugs as features. I've read many paragraphs of technical documentation about how the BTSX team got maps to work that were by every measure NOT supposed to work. Stuff I really wish I hadn't because the more I did the less I cared. The achievements of said wad are largely invisible to the average player and much more vanilla efficient designs could have been made with better planning instead of preserving an existing thing as much as humanly possible.

Anyway, long battles were had because a large swath of the player base WILL not give up using GZDoom, and Graf Zahl will absolutely not give in to recognizing these vanilla bugs as features worth preserving. Which unfortunately nullifies all the work put into vanilla maps that intend to make impossible things possible using engine bugs you aren't supposed to be using.

This is best exemplified in the cacoward winning wad lilith.pk3, which exists solely to exploit what GZDoom won't do for vanilla mappers and other largely unencounterable engine bugs that nearly never happen to the common mapper. Seriously, its some abnormally passive aggressive bullshit that most people will never fully understand until admitted into doomworlds elitist group think tanks.

Stuff like linguortals are nearly impossible to replicate with any reliability for most mappers. I've never tried. I hate working with self referencing sectors for example. Sometimes all you'll do is touch a vertex or have a bad day with a nodebuilder and it fucks everything up. There's no use designing something that relies on it. I just use the tools I know works for me.

For all this noise, doomer boards project is entirely immune to all of it by the simple fact that we go with limit removing compatibility. Our maps are technically playable by just about every source port, so we have amazing reach. We don't need to utilize mapping bugs to work around vanilla engine limits, so we can make bold architecture with excessive detailing wherever we want. Meanwhile it's still very close to vanilla functionally. Working with vanilla limits is an absolute chore and I wouldn't want to see my fellow mappers wasting hours trying to make something playable that is otherwise not very remarkable in the eyes of the player.

Im sorry to say, but the cold reality is that mapping for Eternity is a lot of wasted effort. There's a massive wave of players who play doom outside the doomworld community and many of them use and have great appreciation for GZDoom. And rightfully so! It's a very impressive port! Eternity will not catch up, no matter how respectful to the vanilla engine it intends to be. I might watch some videos of Heartland but I'm not gonna play it. The last time I tried eternity I didnt like it at all. And the arrogance I saw from people like edward850 shutting down people for calling out bugs for not reporting them is absurd. No one owes you their time to report bugs. They just want to play.

It's too much work to work with this shit and not enough people care. In 2021, it's already starting to feel like Doom is fighting against the current trend of technology, since we've moved on to mobile platforms, updated operating systems, etc.

I had an experience recently setting up a multiplayer game on Zandronum for a gamer who was trying it for the first time. I felt like an old fart excusing the weird default things like why the resolution looks fucked up, why they had to type commands into a console, explaining why the autoaim does what it does, why they have to set up their controls a special way, etc. In a lot of ways doom doesn't FEEL like it's SUPPOSED to work on modern systems. Things have always been this way, but a lot of people don't have the patience to learn this shit, so I think it's always going to better to do everything you can to make Doom as friendly a user experience as possible.