Zonker! Glad to hear from you. :) Verge was definitely on my mind pretty constantly while working on SimpleQuest (and, while I continue to work on the Next Thing). I can't say I miss everything about VergeC ;) but I definitely miss a lot about the engine and everything around it. I miss having that community around and active. When did we get so old?
I've used Unity a little and I can't say it's my favourite, but some people have done some pretty awesome things with it. It could definitely do a 2d tile engine... (before I switched to the web-based stuff I was actually starting to build SimpleQuest in Unity).