Rather than "stunning graphics" I would have gladly settled for "adequate graphics" in my games
I can make fairly entertaining games without much difficulty, but I have no talent whatsoever at graphical design.
yep, but sadly one man's "adequate" is another man's "horrid"...
I tend to try mostly for "adequate" in the sense that "the scene looks like what could be reasonably expected", but some other people see this as being fancy.
"why do you need real-time lighting and shadows?" "so that I don't have to deal with lightmaps, and shadows to stop light from going through walls..." (and ray-cast vertex lighting doesn't really look very good, and isn't really faster enough to really justify it). "why not render everything fullbright?", "seriously?!".
(so: the problem, what seems adequate to one person seems horrid to another, and seems overly elaborate to another...).