With the new planned FBX developments, there will be a big difference for many artists. For example, you will build your entire scene in your FBX supporting program, export the models from it, and use Conitecs FBX importer to get it and place them all in WED. You really wouldn't need WED past assigning actions and the such.

Ventilators lightmapping tool also works fine, but once this FBX importer is in, and the new lightmapping capabilities of WED are in, you might not need to do your lightmapping in 3ds max and the such. This would save some time as using Ventilators plugin requires a bit of thought in properly setting up your files.

And I just have to agree with Fastlane on his last couple comments. I've started my project many years ago, and long behold, 3dgs still exists, it's still getting updates, and it has indeed implemented many things I needed and now use. Examples of this would be per-poly collision, shaders, multiple multiplayer improvments, ABT, ect. All of this did not exist when I naively started my project. Can you really say that the majority of the engines starting now will fix everything that you need through many years? All the power to the people creating these engines, I think it's great, but sometimes it's best to stick with proven.