Godot vs Unity

For anyone who has done some game design for fun, any insights into if Godot or Unity is a better option for getting into it? Or any other free (or free if not expecting to make much or any income) gaming programming engines recommended?

I'm a programmer by trade (mostly SAS, some VBScript, Python, R), but not experienced with many point-and-click utilities.
I've looked at some Unity video on Youtube and tried starting one today, but got kinda lost in the different objects just doing a tic-tac-toe. (Trying to code tic-tac-toe seemed a good starter to learn some code by doing.) Seeing a Godot video on tic-tac-toe just now seemed more intuitive but I haven't downloaded Godot to try it yet. Its "node" logic seems reasonable to me.

Long-term goal is a 2D merchant simulator, so basically a UI of choosing places to investigate/research on a world map, then choosing to build/sell stuff at your workshop.

I've been tapping away at Unreal 5 in my spare time, and it has a pretty intuitive interface. You can do a lot with it just via the Blueprint features, though obviously you'll get more out of it if you're proficient in C++. Blueprint functions off similar "node" logic to Godot so if you life that, it might be worth giving a shot.

I know friends who were taught on Unity and it's...functional. You can do a lot with it, but it can be finicky. It's a lot better for some types of games than others. Godot is basically identical in functionality.

From my (very) short dip into Unity many years ago my takeaway was: you should remember that there is a bog-standard C# solution underneath your Unity project and you should (and are kinda expected to) use it.

As long as Unity doesn't do away with their current spyware approach to licensing, I'd say look for other engines. And there's basically only Godot and Unreal 5 left.

Godot is a bit more barebones, but might be suited to 2D development better. While you absolutely can do that in UE5, it's (by heritage alone, if nothing else) more designed to do 3D. Althoigh Paper2D or waht it's called is now integrated in UE with v5, godot might still be better suited.

Edit: It seems they rolled back (some?) of the licensing changes while I wasn't looking, so maybe unity is back on the menu.
Edit²: OK, it seems like it's a bit more complicated than that - you might want to appraise the licensing terms and their usability for yourself.

If you're 2d, probably Godot. If memory serves, Unity handles 2d by basically just...presenting a 2d plane within a 3d space. You still have a lot of the inherent 3d stuff there.

There's also been licensing issues if you plan to release a game. Unity has proposed some pretty rough payment demands, and there's some serious backlash there. This doesn't mean Unity is a bad game engine...on the contrary, it's one of the best options for 3d development if you don't want to drop any cash up front....but it has major tradeoffs.

I also found the learning curve much more accessible in Godot, though I'm certainly not an expert in either engine. I mostly do boring corporate coding, and just dabble with gaming stuff occasionally for fun.

Other engines exist, but the big three are Godot, Unreal, and Unity. Everything else is either expensive or niche. People talk about Gamemaker or the like for 2d games, but those engines are super limiting. If you want to make the sort of games they enable, cool, but they don't have the flexibility of the big three.

First, I want to say the most important quality of Unity: the big, very big amount of tutorials and any kind of info you'll need. This is a good point for Unity. But except for this, I don't like it at all, unless I was a big company like Blizzard.

Second, I want to say that there are plenty of very good engines out there, you shouldn't limit yourself to the two or three most famous.

For example, I used JMonkeyEngine, that is basically a better unity working with Java. I choose that because A) it's free, no licence problems when you finish your game B) Java/Groovy is my favourite language and C) it was good for the project I wanted to create.
Again in java there is LibGDX that is specialized on 2d environment.

It depends a lot on why are you wanting to create a game. If you want simply to create and sell something, you should look for a balance between the best solution for your project and something that isn't too much demanding on learning new things (for example, Unity is good if you are good in C#). Instead, if you want to learn new things, expecially things that you could spend on a job, you should stick either to the most famous (aka the most asked) engines, and this is Unity, or to an engine that is tied to other skills (for example, using JME or libGDX will teach you Java programming).

I've not used Godot, but I quite like Unity. From my experience, it's fairly intuitive and easy to learn. That said, I haven't used it in quite a while and I'm not sure what the final outcome of the licensing debacle was. If anyone could catch me up on that, I'd be grateful.

If you're already proficient with Python, you'll find Godot's native scripting language quite familiar. It's not quite Python, but the syntax is very similar.