gooberking: All you have is something in the middle of a sea of other stuff that looks like it may not have been done as well as a lot of that other stuff.
I think you're right and it's something I've struggled to accept because often those games which look like they've had more effort put into them have actually been knocked together in a game creation tool like Unreal Engine or Unity. It's been very sobering to see for myself how simple it is to make something that looks highly polished in Unreal Engine. In less than a day I can create something that would take me 3 years of full time work to make from scratch. Someone will no doubt claim that I'm exaggerating but they will be wrong!
And of course, this is how it should be. If there was never any progress in the tools we use then there'd never be better games. But it is hard to accept because my only game development skill is programming and that's rapidly becoming irrelevant in the industry. I can honestly see a point in the next 5 to 10 years where the only traditional programming jobs in the game industry will be at Unity, Epic and Crytek.
I'm starting to sound bitter, or at least melodramatic, so I should probably stop. Back to writing boring crap in the finance industry for the rest of my life ;-)