I got that with Unity a little bit. Amazing to work with, lack of certain stuffs because it was the free version was a turn off. Sketch up is piss easy, same issue of lacking stuff, Unreal Editor is really good but its like Unity pretty much, just import level geometry and map elements from a modelling program. Source being so model and prop heavy is becoming a nuisance since I still can't get a model compiled for source, even then would it look as standardly good as the rest of the assets.
So yeah, its no wonder people still use goldsource. Only thing goldsource really needs is a limit break on texture resolution, model resolution, and a little bit better lighting module. It'd look quite good.