Comment by doomlaser

Unlike any reasonable nested entity tree system, you cannot have a prefab that contains other prefabs in its hierarchy, or they lose all concept of being independent prefabs themselves.

Say you design a car prefab and a wheel prefab. If you put 4 wheel prefabs in your car prefab, and then update the wheel prefab, it will not be reflected in the wheels to your car, because you can not have nested prefabs.

Neither will any other set of prefabs — say, the tires on your wheels, or the seats in your car — without going to ludicrous workarounds.

Think about it like a programming language. Imagine if you had a class, and you wanted to include an object of another class in it, but instead of including a reference to that object, your IDE just pasted the entire contents of its class implementation verbabitm into your class, once, and left it like that.

That is how they designed it and that is how it has been, to the frustration of all, for over 13 years. Everyone has to design around this bizarre limitation that isn't present in any other (even simple) game engine. They've promised to fix this before, but haven't.

Now do you understand?

Unity is filled with weird kludges like this, that aren't apparent when you are just starting, in basic systems and critical corners, which is why so many are frustrated with it, despite its strengths in platform ubiquity and market adoption.