I don't play it, as I despise these generic looter shooters that have no soul, and are just there for the dick waggers, but this dev post is really fucking clueless;
"However, as mentioned above and observed in a few discussions recently, these mechanics are not 100% clear and, in some cases (e.g. spike damage protection/death protection & invincibility), are “secret” mechanics with hidden cooldowns. Understanding these mechanics is a key aspect of understanding damage mitigation or one-shot kill instances and related issues."
Secret mechanics? And then "Understanding these mechanics is a key aspect of understanding.... etc."
How do you understand something that's secret?
You built a game for the type of people that need every detail to do the math to be the best, like WoW raiders back in the day, but you have 'secret' and 'hidden' things?
Those are known as bugs. Their game is dead and they know it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/outriders/comments/nmc4vg/outriders_latest_news_and_known_issues_mayjune/
Oh for sure they're deliberate choices. If you can make it look good in 20-year-old tech, you can make it look good in modern tech, because in a pinch, you can use that 20-year-old tech!
There does exist some tech that is hard to use. PS3 was famously notoriously hard to code for due to an insane skill ceiling built into it, to the point where the PS4 was actually a downgrade to maximum specs (but easier to use middle-ground). So some excuses in skill can exist... For amateurs.
And I think that's the issue with the blind consumers. The sticking point is these things can, on occasion, be hard to do... for amateurs. Like themselves. And so they project that competence level on others, and think it realistic that experts taking months working on it would make the same errors.
What gets me about it is... I mentioned beautiful horrors. It is entirely possible to make a beautiful horror. And it is entirely possible to make a beautifully scarred person. Look at Hanako from Katawa Shoujo, half her body is griddle-fresh back-bacon, but still aesthetically pleasing. (I'd link a screencap of her full-body scars shot, but Rule 5 may fall afoul since, you know, Eastern art style).
If you can make someone who has two-face's face-skin stretched across half their body into a pleasing (if troubling and sorrowful) image, I can't see why you can't do the same with any pet project the SJW agenda would wish to project.
Propaganda is fine, in an art medium sense. America's Army was overtly a propaganda FPS game, it was decent. GATE is overtly a JSDF propaganda anime, it's... Well, it's pretty, at least. If you want people to think trans people can be beautiful... make them beautiful. It only highlights their own bigotry and hatred, that they cannot conceive of mere idea that you COULD make a beautiful trans person. The fact the idea apparently never crossed their minds (or it would be the go-to) just stuns me in the levels of hatred they must have for those with the dysphoria affliction.
You bring up so many great points, and if I had more time I would definitely like to delve more into them, but there's one specific point I definitely want to dig into...
You're absolutely right that everyone uses propaganda in different ways, as well as how they depict certain issues and topics.
A good example is that the Japanese beautify everything, even the trans freaks. The crossdressers/trans characters in their media are all made to be beautiful.
However, in their media they recognize that a crossdresser/trans is supposed to pass as the opposite gender, so they still create that character in the ideal gender role.
That works against the Leftist agenda of weakening male/female relations, because if a trans person looks like a female then it just raises the attraction someone has for females who look like the trans person. Hence, it leads back to connecting males with females if the trans person represents an ideal of what men find attractive in females (even though realistically, majority of trannies just look like freaks).
In any case, their agenda is pretty clear: to muddy the ideal. To dilute beauty standards and push the separation of the quitessential male/female archetype.
In short, they don't want beautiful trans people anymore than they want beautiful fair-skinned redheads in movies or media, anymore than they want white heterosexual couples portrayed in a positive light on the mainstream stage, anymore than they want to promote attractive east-Asian females, or encourage healthy relationships for stable birthrates in first-world countries.
It sounds too bogus to be true, yet it seems to be a widespread effort across every single Western media medium to pelt people over the head with this crap.
Anyway, sorry for the long rant, it's just something that bothers the crap out of me because it's inescapable in all of modern media. I've had to basically consume lots of old movies and games to wash the propaganda out of my mind's palate.