One of the reasons I’m glad I chose Ogre 3D is the level of support available from the community. In only 3 hours I went from wanting to compute face normals to doing so, and rendering lines to show them too (something I also didn’t have). Both the computations and the rendering lines mostly came from the Ogre Wiki.
Getting to this stage at my last job took about a day and a half, and that was with the graphics programmer sitting across from me, and already having line and point rendering tools.
If I went with some other graphics engine, it’s unlikely I would have been able to do this in any reasonable amount of time.