For my personnal experience, I've tried first to... Program, which was long, and really frustrating, and also.. too much time consuming for me (and even with organisation, I was like "what this is doing, oh, I see" and 2 seconds later "what this is doing again?").
After that, I just wanted to make a "game", not to make a "program" (and as fun as it should, I also tried to do board games at home ^-^, so you underdstand easily why I think a program isn't the game itself).
I tried first RPG Maker (not sure of the version), and soon after, I realised my version was illegal (really.. I wasn't aware of that), I removed it quickly, I don't want illegals things on my computer! <img src="smileys/smiley21.gif" border="0" align="middle" />
After, I tried Game Maker (8.1 I think, not sure), What the point of using GML if some other language can do more, and also, the D&D doesn't offer good results for me, the Demo itself was weird... simple functions wasn't included, and GMS later was.. Expensive.. And the Economy politics of YoyoGames don't encourage me to go to it
Even I didn't really liked it, I used It for a little time, doing some little things, and finally someone talk to me about Construct Classic (which I didn't try really much) and later, about Construct 2, And that was just... What I needed, I wasn't able to connect to the French community forum (It took me a complete year, because of technical Captcha problems), so I had to understand, and learn, and try and retry the program, which was a lot of fun, and also rewarding
I tried Construct2, Construct 2 Tried me, I payed It some days before the r100, And I'll stay with Construct2, because it is what I needed, and what I still need.
PS: Special thanks to 
Kyatric , who presented me Construct and Construct 2 (you know me under the "Powerfish" name)