- Spending months on making "the perfect motion blur" shader only for every person who doesn't have a GPU that wasn't released a week before the game came out for 4 grand to turn it off within 10 seconds of loading your game. (Briefly pouring one out for the console users who do not have the option to turn off this hell feature)
- Rendering lens flares on everything when the player character isn't wearing a helmet with a visor or anything else that would actually create refracted light in some way. I'm sorry that you all seem to have astigmatism IRL, but this isn't how most people actually see the world, especially when they're a super soldier hopped on "bloodkill boner juice" or whatever ludonarrative drug the PC is hopped up on that gives them better than average human health.
- Endless arguments about XYZ coordinates and directions, but suddenly I am tarred, feathered, and hoisted by my own petard when I suggest using RGB or ABC coordinates to "keep 'em guessing".
- 47 step shader pipeline to make human sweat look real with accurate viscosity metrics, but it's a "too costly" 159 step pipeline to make the human sweat look like those sick as hell gatorade/powerade commercials from the early 00s where the sweat was some color of drink but no one wants to do this because it "destroys the creative vision" in this game where you explicitly state that everyone is fucking aliens but are too cowardly to show it.
- Still thinking that C is a macro assembler language (it is not, and has not been one since people started using anything other than the PDP-11), and shader language syntax is "very cool" and not "man made horrors totally within my comprehension"


