Programming
Our first choice for a game engine was Macromedia Director. We picked Director for several reasons: we were very familiar with Flash, the importing process from Maya seemed relatively simple, and plenty of books and documentation on Shockwave/Director seemed to be available. We were slightly apprehensive about the fact that Director is effectively a dead program (there is hardly any community of developers anymore), but decided to press on anyways.
This was a mistake.
Director lacked several things which would have been necessary to develop our game with any speed at all, one of which was decent 3D support. The 3D package for Director appeared to have been slapped on at the last minute it the latest release. The language was sparsely documented in Lingo and hardly documented at all in Javascript. There was no WYSIWYG editor for placing objects and the vector code never seemed to do what we wanted it to.
Programming
In the end we managed to get a few models to stick together and walk around "on" a landscape we imported (I put "on" in quotes because the models would shoot off into space when walking in certain directions). However, this was after three months of trial and error. Our original game concept was too huge and expansive for both this engine and our time budget.
Near the end of the first semester we were lucky enough to find out about the Psychology Department's need for a very specific project, similar in theme to ours but with a much tighter scope. Since we were rethinking our entire project, it didn't seem like a bad idea to scrap the engine we were using, and switch to the Torque engine by GarageGames.