I think No Time To Play said it best by asking "The best engines for what? It depends on the games I want to make."
I've always said that the best programming language doesn't exist, and the same goes for game engines. And I prefer to code my own game engines, the the one I'm using now is just written in C++, although I must admit I've used the SDL2 framework into it to save myself a lot of work, as you really don't wanna do the work that SDL2 takes out of your hands yourself, no sir.
Is my own engine better than others? For me it is... but I'm quite sure it might not be suitable for others, but why should I care about that? I created it for my own purposes, and I did make it open source, so if you think you have a use for it, I won't stop you (I may later try to create to make some things more user friendly and document it out better and create a page for it, but for now, it's enough that it fills my own needs).
I don't believe in "the best"... I believe in the tool that works for me.