Old perhaps, but allow lot of visual advanced stuff as metal and roughtness, simple specular shader can't do, and lot more. This is what people are going to use today, specially with new tools like Substance or others allowing to create such advanced textures for metal ,roughness, reflection . Unreal has shaders extended from very long time as their shader editor allowed you to make custom kind of metal/specular shader different and more advanced than simple specular.
LE3 uses standard even lot more old shaders as this is basic specular/normal map, it don't have metal, roughness , real relflective shaders that are becoming the new standard. I just hope that will come in LE3 caus it makes a real difference in visual quality, like advanced lightening is looking very different from Basic lights and shadows.