To extend your analogy: if the house is a listed building (UK concept; apparently US equivalent is listed in National Register of Historic Places), by law you cannot just tear it down. You need to do much more work to renovate what can be done without disturbing the original structure. This obviously costs much more and is generally done by different specialists, who have harder job and hence are better paid. So the question comes back to: what kind of work do you want to do...

And, of course, the next level of procrastination is to develop your own programming language, which you will use to write the engine to use in creating the game :-) Definitely hats off to Jon for pulling it off - he had a lot of focus and some previous experience - and it also helps to have re$ource$ from past successful games. For many of us, the lure of developing better tools, rather than the end product, proves to be too strong to resist. At least Jon stopped short of developing own OS :-)

True for many, but I actually have been acquiring some computing books I had enjoyed reading in my youth (e.g. Organick's Multics). Perhaps living permanently abroad strengthens nostalgia...