I created a game engine for a game, the game sold well enough to make it worth my effort (and then some). But I would say that about 70% of my time was building the engine, "cool tools" and "advanced in-game debugging" that users never saw.

Only power users would bother with the 'console' and console commands (most didn't even know it existed and most played with controllers anyways). None of that really matters. It doesn't matter how nice my text render in the console and the cool drop down effect. 99% of the time the end user would never see or care about that. If they were using the console they just wanted it to input commands and the aesthetics or advanced functions didn't matter.

I did it because I enjoyed it and made my life slightly easier. But money wise, it totally was NOT worth it, lol

Same for my level editor and other development tools. A bare minimum version chonked full of bugs would have made more sense, in terms of dollars returned. If I wanted to maxium returns, I should have spent more time adding context and game features instead of tweaking my development tools.

Granted, some tools helped me be more productive, so that is a good investment. But there is a cross over point between being more productive and just adding cool stuff because I like shiny things.