About Torque...
I bought Torque two years ago to develop a new game. The thing is powerful enough but after months of trying, I never managed to really use it in the way I intended. I'm far from being a power C coder but I'm not a newbie either in game development, having already released a full 2d adventure game (www.absurdus.net).
Since I'm working with darkbasic, dedvelopment has been going much faster. Of course, the performances are not equal but I prefer to release a slow game than no game. Furthermore, Darkbasic isn't that slow and DarkSdk promises to make the engine even more competitive.
Overall, choose your engine according to your skills, game design, resources and ambition. (this all seems obvious, I wonder now why I wanted to write this.)
Jonathan
Jonathan