I.. get the criticism Jim..
but .. I find that you really pissed out of the bucket mentioning Unity as an engine of choice like a bad thing or a cheap thing, sure it can be, but so can most other engines today, since they are adopting the business model too. To be honest I was not a big believer of the Unity3d engine initially, It seemed like a stitched up B Grade engine. But nowadays, if you put some effort into it, you can make quality stuff with it (just like any game).
With our indie studio, we have been developing with it for a few years, and, sure it has some shortcomings, but it is not just a "lets make it cheap for ourselves" solution. In fact nowadays, using Unreal 4, UDK3 or CryEngine is arguably cheaper than using Unity Pro.
Even with Real cheap engines you can get fantastic results if your team is talented enough, I know you are not specifically calling out indies who try to do interesting things, but by painting it with such broad strokes you are putting them all in one bag. If someone makes a gamejam experiment and puts it out for people to play, they are not scheming how to fool all the audience, they are probably simply trying to get something mildly presentable out, and rarely do the devs seek to be published or even to get paid for them.
Particularly, if you are just a guy trying to get your feet wet doing some basic scripting or finding out how to make a game, it is actually a FANTASTIC idea. Sure it might be crap (most first projects are), but completing a project.. no matter how small or shitty it might seem to you, is nothing to scoff at, and it can be an excellent learning experience.
In these cases the teams working rarely have a lot of testing and don't have QA budget at all, it is a thing they made, and rarely do they try to show it off as more than that. It will obviously have bugs, it will likely Break, it will have shitty art , and faulty optimized code.. They never really even get out of alpha... SO?
Would you rather have a world where potentially good ideas die out because of impossible production costs? You yourself have rambled on and on about how risk averse the AAA industry is, well that's part of the issue, and I understand that some of these slender wannabees show the exact same staleness problems. But I'm actually thankful for the alternatives that indies are being offered today to develop even the silliest of concept into prototypes. Sure, many of them are generic derivative crappy less-than-games, but there is also unbridled potential, and occasionally some really fantastic and surprising ideas.
So if Pewdiepie or Patrick Klepek ( who sometimes picks borderline Broken games for his "worth Playing" section at Giantbomb) play them because they have some component that might appeal to them, well thanks internet, id rather them show it and allow people to like or dislike. Rather than preemptively censure because they use a "cheap engine" or have many bugs, as if the developer was willfully trying to fool us.