It's a lower level engine (as in C is a lower level language than C#), and that's great for understanding how some of the things work in an engine. It still abstracts away some stuff but not as much as unity or unreal. Apart from that, i think that it's not a good engine to start a new project in 2021, because of the limitations of the engine. It catered to a different era. Also when compared to others workflow sucks. Though I admit these limitations and dated workflow has a charm of it's own and forces you to get creative. But if you hit a hard limitation or a project breaking bug it's not fun. Last time i gave up, I was trying to implement a passable PBR shader. I gave up because cubemaps did not have mipmaps, and workarounds were too much work.

I still think JCL should throw away propriety parts(Lite-c compiler plus whatever) and open-source the parts they own the rights to. I just want to plug a new renderer and scripting language to it for old time's sake.