Ooh, thanks for the Renpy links! I actually tried messing with Renpy for point and click games some time ago, but I had 200% less coding knowledge so I had absolutely no idea what was going on. If I get super super frustrated in the next few days I might give it another try (with my newfound beginner coding knowledge!) but for now I'm gonna stubbornly fight AGS (and hopefully have some thoughts to share at the end!)
So far, my main problem with text is that I was really envisioning a kind of Ace Attorney style game with point & click investigation sections and visual novel looking conversation sections. The point & click sections are pretty much like I imagined, but AGS dialogue is EITHER speech bubbles above sprites' heads or text boxes on the top half of the screen with a special character portrait to the side. And there isn't much of a way to customize it except coding your own system from scratch, so... I think at this rate I'm gonna just try to make the default settings work for me aha :'(
But I'll definitely write up something about AGS at the end of this, because I imagine I'll have lots of words to say :')