Also the included kinks in them really appeal to me as well. I used to use RPG maker for years in the early 2000's, but am curious how much better its gotten over time? I haven't used it since 2008 or so.
Viewing post in Chapter 3 Progress Update: New Areas, New Enemies comments
Oh MV, which came out around 2015/2016 I think, is a huge step up from the earlier stuff. Much better gui IMHO, huge plugin ecosystem. If you want, you can basically put the whole thing up on blocks and make it whatever you like, because MV swaps from being an ordinary exe to basically just a headerless browser running a big pile of javascript. So definitionally, anything js can do, MV can probably do as well.
MZ came out a bit later, which was more of a modest tweak to MV to improve the GUI a bit more, add a few things here and there. And then...they made it into an addon for Unity. YECH. I'm content to stick with MV.