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If it were just personal visual preferences, sure. But if it being on actually impedes mappers due to stuff being visible that shouldn't be, then making it optional does not in any way solve that problem. Therefore I consider the feature broken.

I'm not frustrated, I am not emotionally attached to the feature in any way. It was an idea that was suggested to check out, and I did. Learned some things in the process, it's all good But I'm strongly opposed to leaving a broken feature in the game. We already have enough obscure features that are prone to break because they are not commonly used. If the feature isn't suitable for widespread adoption, then it's better to remove it and keep the code base clean and maintainable. How much time I did or didn't spend on the feature doesn't matter - that'd be a sunken cost fallacy.

My personal experience matches what @AluminumHaste said. Eight years ago I tried to make my first mission a large one, got frustrated and gave up. Three years ago I tried again, but this time started small. I finished it, and have done a couple more since, with another in the works.

Is there a simple way to reproduce the whatever bug some people think the frob highlight has?

I generally prefer small to medium missions anyway. Give me an hour-long mansion heist any day of the week. They're the missions I like to play, so they're the ones I'll make

Yes exactly, getting that first completion is huge, it let's you know basically if this is something you want to continue doing. Then you can start tackling larger missions.

Keep at it, don't bite off more than you can chew though!!!! 90% of all mission authors give up after a short time because the project seems insurmountable. It's why the A-Z guide focuses on such a small little mission, it's complete-able in a reasonable amount of time.

Pity, I grew fond of the new frob visuals

It's one of those things that appears to be simple to do, but really isn't. At the end of the day, there are really only two ways to do it: Mark the highlight mesh in the stencil buffer, then draw an extruded version of the mesh, skipping any pixels marked in the stencil and thus producing the outline. Works with depth out of the box, but will typically produce a hard border, not a soft glow. However, creating the extruded mesh is not a trivial thing for any non-convex mesh. Might be that Unity has tools for this, but we don't, and spending the time to implement something like this for an effect that's already controversial, anyway, seems like a huge waste of effort. There are some techniques with geometry shaders that can be used here, but you still need to preprocess the mesh data for them to work. Do an image-based effect. Draw the object to a separate color buffer, then blur it to create a soft screen-space silhouette. Can then be applied to the original buffer, again using a stencil mask to cut away the insides of the object. This is what TDM currently does, it looks pretty decent and is relatively easy to do. However, it has no concept of depth, at all. I've tried some hackery on top to get it to respect depth, which is what r_frobIgnoreDepth 0 does, but it's not pretty. Might be able to do better, but that would eat more development time with uncertain outcome. In the end, the current implementation is what you can do in TDM with moderate effort. Anything better requires significantly more effort, and given the lukewarm reaction to the feature, I really don't think it's worth that development time.

Nobody ever asked for this feature to be removed completely. Some people like it, others don't. So we should do what was already suggested, replace the "frob helper" option which probably nobody ever uses with a "frob outline" option which is default off and everybody should be happy and no work has been wasted!

Still chugging along on my mansion level. It's so easy to get disheartened because what you're building looks like poo, but it all looks so much worse in DarkRadiant than it does in game. Even a stark, empty room looks not so awful in the actual game.