So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[LP]

People are not irreplaceable, the people who think they are make themselves more replaceable.

As much as I would like this to be true, in case of Delphi/Pascal jobs, unfortunately this is not the case anymore, especially in very specialized, highly technical areas, so when a person leaves, you have pretty much to rethink some of the priorities. Granted, as long as the project is well designed, written and documented (which is rarely the case), it is easy to just keep maintaining, but that usually doesn't go beyond changing comments, adjusting code formatting or doing some other "esthetic" changes - for an actual development you really have to have the same expertise as the other person and know the project well, where in case of large projects it could be increasingly difficult.

So with all that in mind, sounds like an excuse not to give me a good candidate for an engine I could use as a newbie. But, as I'm feeling generous, if you can't meet that criteria, lets discount it and instead go for a 75% requirements fit.

The problem is that you've actually defined conflicting, self-excluding requirements, so either all frameworks fall into your criterias or none.

If you are a total beginner, then none of the existing Pascal engines would suit you because... in 99% of cases, you'll end up using JavaScript with WebGL instead of Pascal, or one of other attractive options such as C#, Java or Swift, depending on your needs.

If you are aiming at native development and for some crazy reason can't use C++, aiming for Pascal, then it likely you are a mid-aged person or even someone who has already retired, to pursue a favorite language of your youth. In this case, wasting 10 years to master OpenGL is definitely undesired, so you can use any of the engines/frameworks from one of existing lists, that people enjoy making. Most of them are cross-platform and suit all your criterias.

As an alternative, since you mentioned that existing engines/frameworks have deficiencies in your point of view, why not helping to improve them instead? Why not promoting Pascal itself by making events, LAN parties, conferences and so on, writing tutorials for existing frameworks, making new examples, etc.