The reason I don't really like to use 3D Gamestudio myself is because I don't like the workflow. The tools are not very good and the programming environment is simplified to a fault. I particularly don't like how Gamestudio handles your code. Events, the wait() command, and the your/my pointer seem to be very volatile and cause problems even if you use them the "correct" way. I find this hard to express, but Lite-C seems to promote the idea that you should never know how your code is being executed, and in what order.

On top of all that, over the last several years I've moved very far from being a game designer and that's primarily what Gamestudio is geared toward.

Most of my hobby programming involves what I like to call video game system engineering. I like putting together the guts of my own game engines, like writing the entity handlers, defining the data structures, and designing the major subsystems (collision, networking, rendering). I really enjoy writing in pure C code because its easier to debug than object-oriented code and it suits my method of coding (which is quite low to the ground) really well.