What are your thoughts on Lua Love [1] ? I have done some Unity, Unreal, Pygame, Processing, etc. And Love has always had the shortest time from idea to running sketch.
If your game has more than trivial amount of UI, particle-systems, 3D, etc then it becomes very time consuming. To write and tweak a full blown responsive UI like in-game windows, alerts, animations etc with code-only is not trivial. With a full-featured editor like Unity and Godot, UI, particles, tweened-animations and such becomes much easier as you can keep interactively tweak things around until its perfect without the edit-code & recompile cycle.
There's also King's "Defold" engine which uses Lua and has a visual editor but the last time I used it over a year ago, I found there was almost no in-game UI libraries so although making the prototype was fun and relatively easy adding UI became difficult.
Do you only use it for quick prototyping of ideas and then move over to a different engine if you like the idea and want to expand?
I imagine the answer could come down to the scope of the game.