I have found that transitioning to another language after 4+ years of C++ was quite easy actually. If you are willing to give another language a shot there are many engines out there that use like C# or their own scripting language. If you are comfortable with C++ though, you could always use an engine that instead of using a scripting language to tell the engine what to do... you actually program it. Here is a decent list of game engines with some having a grid showing what they use and what they don't. I hope this helps you, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

There's a lot of pride going the hard route! If this what interests you most! I remember being in a daze about DirectX11 and everything. I came from a programming history since 8 or 7 I can't remember. I even used UDK for a bit then suddenly...I felt this feeling, "I should be doing something a bit more rewarding!" So, I went back to C++ and still learning more awesome stuff! On additional notes, look at what licensing it requires before going for already out of the box engine. UDK's pretty steep - it's 99 dollars but every like 35,000 game title sold they take out a percentage. IF you truely want to make your own engine because you want it to fit your style then by all means - program your own engine. This is just my opinion though! Last notes, is you could find that you can add cool stuff your engine could do better!