Quote: "Well if you load crap into CrySDK it won't turn into gold, it will turn into glorified crap with global illumination and screen space ambient occlusion."
It's as they say, a poor worksman blames his tools. To be honest, in terms of 'quality', what I've been coming up with in Unity3D is no better, sure it handles things differently and I might have changed a few things on my project since the DBP version but using Unity3D hasn't suddenly made me awesome, it has just been more convenient for me.
Quote: "Right now I'm taking my time in familiarizing myself with the engine. "
Fairplay, it's not that bad transitioning from DBP to Unity3D, some new concepts you have to get used to, but at least the logic translates well.
If you're going the C# route I totally recommend the 3D Buzz tutorials, whilst they are geared to people who are new to game design, but they are actually well explained and well detailed tutorials and worth it in my opinion.
The two I used to get started were:
Advanced Character Controller (you need this first)
I'm only calling it 'advanced' because it's more complicated than the character controllers that come with Unity3D, but this is far superior, plus it teaches you many concepts you'll want to use in your own character controller.
3D Platformer
This one is trying to base itself a little on Tomb Raider without making it too complicated. But it's very practical in that it takes your through many features in the editor, applying them to your scene then jumping into C# and showing you more scripting concepts. It requires the above character controller.
The tutorials also use Maya, but I was able to skip those steps as I'm using Carrara in my workflow instead. In all honesty, I didn't even complete them, once I got so far I felt I understood and wanted to experiment for myself.
Also, if they're of any use to you in getting familiar with the program, I've written a few
tutorials myself. They're just my solutions to problems, but hope they're useful to somebody.