Oki don't get me wrong here Blitz is a powerful language, however that said - it is a face value language.
DarkBasic in its original Standard form was pretty unimpressive, i mean was still a cool program - but the data access and features were lacking.
But when Memblocks were introduced along with the more reliable data access which has been progressed into Professional ... well quite simply the update gave DarkBasic immense power that most users even now still haven't been able to relise exactly what is capable.
On the face of the products, for newbies - Blitz vs DarkBasic really ... its a one sided argument - because all they're looking for is power and commands that make the entire game for them.
But unfortunatly Blitz stops at the face value level, and when you go in deeper with more skill there isn't alot more that can be produced with it.
Whereas with DarkBasic when you gain the skills for the lower levels you see there is a whole new world of programming to explore.
That for me is probably the most important aspect i've found when looking at programming languages.
That once you've learnt the commands it has, howto manipulate them to do what you want rather than exactly what they're designed to do.
For example alot of people use memblocks to store simple data, but i've seen people using them for creating secondry UV map layer for models and then combining the textures for use, i've seen them used for creating patch matrix which run faster than DB's and you can access them anyway you choose, i've seen the DLLs being used in conjuntion with the Render Pipeline of DirectX to produce Anti-Aliasing and even simple Shaders!
See in DirectX Rendering can be software driven, meaning you calculate the arthmatic within the program for rendering which only uses a percentage of the CPU shared with everything else at the time. Whereas Hardware Renderers use the graphics cards floating point processor exclusively for this, designed specifically for doing this.
Now the pipeline is VERY important to this and is done on two levels sometimes ... the program Pipeline and the hardware Pipeline - and basically what this does is explain to the graphics card and line up what its to render.
Which is why pipelines and Zbuffers are always interactable because they work together closely...
A good pipeline finds out what needs to be rendered and how before needing the Graphics Chip or Processor to do this, and Hardware pipelines are the little cache chips with just double check for more complex scenes.
The end result is less polygons are actually render'd unnessarily allowing your hardware to think about more important things
because each Nth Mbit of Object data requires a seperate calculation cycle, with only 4 per cycle on the most upto date GPU's this means if you have 10,000 objects regardless of the polygons it'll start to die a little with a poor pipeline to sort this all out
hopefully that clears alot up
Anata aru kowagaru no watashi! 
