Well, I've been hooked with the Unreal 3 Engine nowadays, we got licenses at school to use it, so that really puts on some pressure to learn it.
First off, they streamlined the layout of the editor and tools with 3dstudiomax and a little Maya, you can easily import new content and export maps. The placement and lightning of models and props is also really easy. And the interface is nice to work with.
But, there's one thing. And that is that it runs fine on the school computers, but the editor just doesn't seems to want to work on my own computer, which is rather annoying since I will need to do a large portion of the work at home, mainly because I only got 8 weeks to learn all the bits n bobbles of the engine, make a decent playing map that will be judged by others then the teacher. And make sure the rest of my team gets the idea, since they never have made maps for games before.
I suppose, that in reality it doesn't differ a lot from any real-life job situation with tight deadlines. Funny thing is, i actually enjoy this kind of pressure, it really allows people to push themselves to the edge and go beyond.
Oh, they also upgrade to max 2009, which seems to lack something called stability on the older school computers....