Between the shader workshops, the manual's great examples, and the way materials work and can be strung together in Gamestudio, it truly is very easy to learn to write shaders -- more so than in other engines.
Again, it is way easier to drag a few nodes to a surface and to connect them. I just did it in Vision3d and I did it in C4 and UDK. There is a simple lighting node with connectors for Diffuse, Normal, SpecularColor, SpecExponent, SpecMultiplier, Opacity and AmbientColor. And I can drag TextureNodes or Constants or whatever to it.
I create shaders in minutes there and I dont have to care about the number of lights, fog, static or dynamic lighting. The lighting node contains all this. There are some general flags to activate alpha testing as an example.
But in the end an artist can create powerful shaders that way. And there is no exponential explosion of shaders for every number of lights.
And a workshop is even not necessary. It is very intuitive especially since most artists already know such node-editors from their 3d rendering applications.
Here are some images of how it works in Lightwave and in UDK. There is acutally no difference between realtime and still-rendering applications. It just works. And that is how most projects do their work, how most applications are built. So I said that this is how reality is today.
