TGEA a good engine for someone who wants to focus on design?

I'm a computer engineer by schooling, and have worked a couple years doing some embedded firmware coding in C for aviation, but have always liked the idea of making my own game. I've done some 3D modelling back many years ago as well, and now I'd like to explore making my own game.

First, I'm deployed in Iraq, so learning this is limited, as my internet access may come and go for long periods at a time. But it also means I have long periods of free time, (or none at all for stretches). I'm a big one for games that look good, and although I've done a bit of programming in my day, I'm more interested in creating a world in a game than programming and spending days on end figuring out how to get a character to move where you click. I'd like to work on something similar to how Diablo or Dungeon Siege works, but with a different game system and feel, of course. An isometric 3D RPG sorta game. It's not that I can't code, it's just not what drives me, and not what I want to get out of this. The game is mainly for my own development rather than to be some great big seller, but for my own sake, I want it to look good. in the future I may decide to do something more with it.

Now, the question is, given that I want to play a lot with shaders, special effects and particles and such, but am interested in developing a game, not developing code, is TGEA something that I could work with? Are there other versions of Torque which are more drag and drop, write some scripts, move to the next entity sort of things? I tried the demo and wasn't able to get much out of it. It seems like it could do what I want, but since I couldn't start from ground zero and write some little test game, it's hard to tell.

Specification wise, TGEA looks like what I'm interested in, but the web page keeps saying you need to dig under the hood to make games, which is NOT what I want. I want some nice drag and drop editor, and focus on the world, not the code. I've also got a mac and have been looking at Unity3D, so comparisons on the two would be helpful.