I'll tell you what's practical. If pirates start charging me for stuff, and go thru all the hassle making their stuff difficult to copy, I'd rather just buy the original thru official channels.
If they come up with some way to make it as hard as possible for the buyers to share these cracked games among them, they could make a lot of money with this.
I do get where they're coming from with Lua. With luci (the web interface), Lua must be installed as it's a requirement. However, it might be the stripped down version as well (AFAIK). Also, if you know bash & coreutils already, it might be counterproductive to have to learn something new.
I'm just glad that I could help. It's not fun to get stuck in such technical roadblock.
Yeah I hear you. While I personally never fell like it's that severe of functional limitations, I am aware on how stripped down busybox is. I'm also aware that some systems lives off 4MiB of flash and 32MiB of memory, so if you ask that question, you might get the answer "yes, it is necessary".
Meanwhile, if you have the luxury to install bash (or other full-featured shell), then that's one option to consider. You seem lime you're familiar with UNIX shell, and Lua is a whole new language. The Lua interpreter that comes by default might be stripped down as well anyway.