I've been making an RPG Maker (MV) game for about a year and it's been a long term project but there seems to be lots of stigma over the engine and I feel many people wouldn't play it due to the fact. Should I switch engines? I thoroughly enjoy using RPG Maker but I feel as if people would be averted away from my game.
The problem with RPG Maker is that it is just very limited in some ways so you can't fully avoid that your game will look and feel like an RPGMaker game to some extent, no matter how much effort you put into it.
But I think that's okay - yeah, there's definitely some stigma around RPG Maker, but I've seen some very fun games made in it, and there's some very critically acclaimed RPGMaker games too.
If you like RPG Maker, keep using RPG Maker.
If you want to branch out, outside of the types of games that RPG Maker is known for, finish up this project, and then try a different engine out and see how you feel. If you want to make that style of RPG forever, stick with RPG Maker, and just learn enough tricks to tweak it and make it more unique, e.g. make your own art assets (or buy them) and learn how to make the game looks and feel less like a default RPG Maker experience.
RPG Maker is awesome because it is simple. If you hop over to the Unity, Godot and Unreal engines, they get really complicated really fast. You can absolutely learn them, but the initial learning curve is steep compared to RPG Maker.
Personally, I'd care more about my perspective on an engine - do I feel comfortable working with this? Does it help me, or does it stand in my way? Could I make something better with other tooling? - than about the perspective of the very small subset of players who actually care about the engine.
Sure, Godot is a far better game engine than RPG Maker, mostly because it has a completely different scope, and it doesn't carry the same stigma as RPG Maker (which is somewhat deserved because RPG Maker makes cheap asset flips easier than any other engine). But if you cannot deliver your game with Godot, or it takes you three times as much work as it would have in RPG Maker, or the finished game in Godot sucks because you don't really understand Godot as well as RPG Maker, avoiding the stigma of RPG Maker is not going to save you.
(But if you do stick to RPG Maker, you absolutely need to know how to use its scripting to build custom UI and mechanics if you want to build something that does not feel like every other RPG Maker game out there.)
