You probably did not get my point. I did not talk about AAA games. I just want to express that there is a difference of technology to use depending on the target audience. And Alpha Prime is an example that targets core gamers and no casual gamers although it is not a Crysis or HL2, it still is not a casual game.

And I agree with you that it makes sense to use dedicated tools like UDK to make games aiming to core gamers. But indie technology like Unity is getting closer. With the current toolset it works very similar (occlusion culling, static and dynamic lightmapping, realtime specularity and normal maps even when using static lightmaps, deferred renderer, unlimited number of lights, ...).
Leadwerks and C4 are also tools going into the core-gamers directions. Thus it makes it a bit harder to address casual game developers who are going with Unity or Shiva (more platforms, better scalable).

To come back to Torque: It also tried to go that way. The Instant Action platform was advertised to address core gamers and thus the technology should become strong enough to support this concept. But it grew too slow. And there are just way more casual developers than core-game devs.

I personally checked a lot of these tools in FPS scenarios. And at this moment I would probably start a FPS project in UDK, it renders just faster and still looks amazing. My second option would be Unity. The new toolset is very good and flexible. The workflow is even better.
But I have read in some forums that Crytek wants to offer a similar license like UDK. So I am really looking forward to check that out as an additional option.