Speeding up Unreal Editor launch by not spawning unused tooltips

From a purely technical perspective, UE is an absolute monster. It's not even remotely in the same league as Unity, Godot, etc. when it comes to iteration difficulty and tooling.

I struggle with UE over others for any project that doesn't demand an HDRP equivalent and nanometric mesh resolution. Unity isn't exactly a walk in the park either but the iteration speed tends to be much higher if you aren't a AAA wizard with an entire army at your disposal. I've never once had a UE project on my machine that made me feel I was on a happy path.

Godot and Unity are like cheating by comparison. ~Instant play mode and trivial debugging experience makes a huge difference for solo and small teams. Any experienced .NET developer can become productive on a Unity project in <1 day with reasonable mentorship. The best strategy I had for UE was to just use blueprints, but this is really bad at source control and code review time.

I think UE is so good at graphics that there is no reason to use it for most of the developers. I don't understand why many indie developers chose to use it.

I'm working with a friend on a project and desperately trying to sway him away from Unreal. His reason for wanting to use it is because he can build the engine from source and modify it any way he wants (and he intends to attempt just that). He's also very much into pushing the engine's lighting to its limits.

We're a team with < 10 employees. He's paying very handsomely, so even if his Unreal foray is an absolute disaster, I'll have the savings to find something else.