Well necromancing an old forum thread isn't ALWAYS a bad thing (it mostly is, but in some cases it isn't).
When it comes to your distaste about Epic. Epic used to be Epic Megagames, and were back then a bunch of enthusiastic developers themselves, and yeah they were semi-indie. Games like Epic Pinball, Jill of the Jungle and Jazz Jackrabbit, show the passion they had back then. Now that Epic has become a true AAA company, I miss that spirit, and let's say, most AAA companies are going that way, only a few exceptions.
I like products (could be anything) made with passion for the job. Like I said, could be anything. Like Disney's movie "Snow White" in which Walt Disney literally put his own house on the line to get the funding to create that movie, and the animators would only be paid if the movie was a success, but you never know beforehand if it will be, so the animators too took a risk, but in the end the result was worth it, although the movie may not be completely fit for modern standards, but hey, this is the time pre-WWII we're talking about. And so I also like games written with passion. Some of them may look amateur, but they are really cool nevertheless... Sites like itch.io and Game Jolt do have such games.
A downside is that thanks to tools making coding very very easy these days, there are also a lot of products out there that never get finished, or some people who mindlessly dump some assets together. The coming of the internet is also responsible for this, though. Back in my day (NOW I sound like an old man), there was no internet, or at least, only very little people had it. You had to come up with something really great to appeal magazines, and that wasn't exactly easy. And indeed jams are fun, but I prefer to aim for game that require time to develop rather than a game that must be ready in less than a week.
And yeah, I guess I should be using Twitter more myself. I never liked that medium, but it appears to have great effects if you manage to write that "perfect tweet".