My personal view on the subject of pre-existing engines is this. PGD's main goal is to get a winner that stands a change at IGF. To be honest, most of the entries in IGF have been working on their entries for years. This is not jus the engine its everything; engines, storylines, graphics, music, sound, etc...

PGD is a short turn competition, and a pre-built engine allows the developers to focus on polishing; storyline, graphics, music, sound, etc...

Tanx started from scratch, this is true (at least its been posed as true). It went up against many entries that started with existing engines, and won. Not because of its engine, because it was fun, semi-stable, and had a good storyline to go with it.

Last year I started on JumpStart, I plan on using it for this years compo as well. I've spent ALOT of time on it to make sure that I can focus on my entries polishing points. Wasting time on re-inventing the wheel isn't something I want to do again, nor is it something I will do again until I start playing in 3D.

In short: An engine does not a game make.

One final note: I would say that using Asphere, GLScene, or DelphiX is the use of a pre-existing engine. They give the developer a real edge in things that take VERY long periods to create, font renders, graphics wrappers, image and texture loading, and etc... Call it what you want, but these provide more then just a simple wrapper around existing 3rd party contexts. After all, where is the DirectX API to load an MD3 model? How about the API method to automatically load a 333x231 bitmap with color key into OpenGL and make it work on most graphics cards? These are things that an Engine does, not a game. The game simply makes use of the features surfaced by the engine.