Game engine wise, a easy workflow for making simple games. Vulkan port is also on the table, possibly in the near future. No deadline to my knowledge though, but that might be because it’s Blender oriented and not UPBGE specific.
Vulkan will supposedly help with performance, for those who have devices that are powerful enough to use it.
Have you tried baking to see if that helps?
You forgot their cool logic-nodes, which, most of the UI and Python source they legitimately ripped from Armory source like they did with the old Armory website. Some may argue that the UPBGE team likes to “borrow” other people’s stuff. Roughly 80% of their source is from Blender or even BGE source, most of which they didn’t create (some of them did a few BGE commits for Blender).
Spot on, see here:
I’d say that ties in with this:
To be honest, since UPBGE isn’t officially incorporated with Blender, nor is it based on an add-on framework, it’ll probably never be fully compatible with Blender.