"but the ongoing argument that people should be buying it instead of GS just seems counter intuitive"

Well I have never said people shouldn't be buying gamestudio , as I myself have a copy. I have compared them both and have stated that the way things are going gamestudio is being far surpassed by engines like Unity and T3D , with the MAIN reason for my argument being cross platform deployment , and not the plug and play shaders(which I also do love btw) . And one of the reasons I post the comparisons is in hope Conitec will see how it's customers are feeling towards it's engine in comparison with the competition's engine. I would assume it's in conitec's interest to be aware of this issues , as this is their business , and I'm almost certain that they've realized the mistake they've don with A7 , hence I keep saying I'm not buying A7 but waiting till A8 to buy , if A8 delivers all the features everyone wanted for A7.

Still , gamestudio is a good engine , but there is no doubt in my mind that it is no longer the number 1 indie engine as it was a couple of years ago , but it is now somewhere around number 3 or 4, which is still decent.

But in any case , I never said people shouldn't buy A7 , I said you should check out T3d as it's looking very impressive , and thought I should give a heads up to my fellow GameStudio game developers about this new iteration of the Torque Engine soon to be released.I still love gamestudio , but I do wish some of our requests would have been payed some more attention to in the development of A7 , hence my disappointment with it and constant comparison to the competitor engines.