I started living by the adage "Make games, not engines". I would spend months making an engine to make a game in my head, and get burnt out because I wanted to make games, that is why I was writing the engine in the first place. Unity allowed me to save months and start working on a ACTUAL game idea I had the day I had the idea. I am creating levels, writing scripts and gameplay, all on day one. It would have taken me 3 months at least to get to that point in XNA. I think it is still good to have that knowledge to be able to write an engine from scratch(a basic one) to understand how everything fits together, but this can be seen as a side project, not a "I have to finish this crappy engine to make a game" type of endeavor.
Unity vs XNA
To make a typical AAA quality popular game or game engine takes years even with a team, starting from scratch to end-user, so nobody should feel bad about abandoning the game engine jungle.
"However, if you don't understand what the limitations actually are then it is highly unlikely that you would be able to implement the missing functionality yourself using a lower level framework such as XNA anyway."
Third party coding plugged into XNA saves months. Some coders are willing to give you their shelved libraries no cost, such as terrain editors, scene graphics, or gameplay scripts - all of which may be altered to your liking.
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That is true, a big profile game takes an entire team and much time. My focus is not on designing an AAA game, rather it is on designing something smaller scale that I can enjoy and maybe a few others find entertaining as well.
Author
Also as I'm a C# developer for a living, I do coding all day long so getting to do some design is more fun :D
Unity is a very cool engine, really easy to use, you have most of the needed features already implemented or you can buy them from the store.
On the other hand XNA is not an engine, it's a framework. Which means you have to code everything yourself, i.e., you'll learn more. :)
Also there are engines that are built on top of XNA, I recommend http://xnafinalengine.codeplex.com/. Hopefully there will be a MonoGame version.
When we are at MonoGame, it is basicly a Mono port of XNA, which means it can basicly run on Linux, MacOS or any other platform. http://www.monogame.net/
If you'd like to start with XNA I'd recommend MonoGame, considering that XNA is not supported any more.
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