The games industry is shit, Hollywood is shit, so learn Blender, game engines and make your own shit
You'll have more fun making your own stuff and knowing it will at least be even half-decent compared to the absolute crap the industry is churning out these days will keep up the motivation. Rather than constantly getting your hopes up and setting yourself up for disappointment and expecting somebody to rescue you.
Hardly. In Unreal you could probably pull out a half-assed tech demo within a month or two. Mind you, I'm saying half-assed. A reasonably decent tech demo might take you a few months, depending on how much of the overall project you have plotted out.
Also what Lethn said is accurate. Like Jedi Outcast for example took Raven about a month to push out a tech demo. And a few months to start fleshing out the rest of the details. And while yes, they had some stellar professionals in the field and were building off of previous work done from a couple of previous titles, but they also had far fewer engine/industry tools available and at their disposal.
Mostly it's about going in with a clear vision, staying on task, and seeing things through. Not that any of that is necessarily easy, but it's very doable if you have the self-discipline, motivation, and relative time/flexibility.
It's also worth pointing out that back in the day if you wanted a game, you'd have to code your own engine or you'd be forced to pay and exorbitant license fee to have access to anything industry standard and even then quite often these internal engines were a closely guarded secret.
Now though? The veil on everything has been lifted, which is why I call devs sometimes outright liars on how difficult it is to make a game. The software has completely changed and yet they insist on larping like they're coding the matrix.
Ah, yes indeed. I forgot to mention that back then the Quake 3 license usually came with a reasonably pricey fee for developers.
Heck, Unreal's royalty plan is insanely reasonable. Essentially they only ask for a cut if the game does as well as your average AA game, and even then I think the cut was only... 5% or something? Yup, just confirmed, it is 5%, but only after reaching a really number in profit from sales.