Meh, Ultima Underworld did not look like crap. It also used sprites.

It wasn't a total flop. You just don't know every decent Doom 3 TC. For instance, now I'm not expert on Doom 3 mods (because, frankly, I monitor open source games) but I still know about the excellent The Dark Mod - a total conversion Thief-inspired game. I'm sure there's plenty more.

Note quite Elite 4, but a pretty good fan-made successor is Oolite. The test versions include support for shaders, bringing more modern looking ships to the game.

http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/

Well on the way to being a usable replacement engine, built with modern tools, instead of some 10+ year old codebase.

The problem is not so much with the pride the submitter takes in his solution - I'm sure he's not as arrogant as your joke implies - but it's in his blinded attitude towards (bordering on worship of) Python:

Python has tremendous advantages... Advantages that have nothing to do with libraries, and can be traced back to the combination of (a) functional programming and (b) the perfect syntax that Python offers. I would truly be amazed to see anyone writing the same sorting logic in C++ in anything less than 3 times the lines of code I wrote for in Python.

Perfect syntax? I mean, come on, besides the fact that perfect means flawless and this being a subjective issue, Python's syntax is far from perfect. It's just better than C/C++. Each to their own. I tried using Python, and (as somebody who uses Java/JavaScript/XML regularly) it just wasn't fun. The submitter needs to learn to speak in relative terms i.e. "It's perfect for me."