Damien Schubert has an interesting video game development post entitled "No Scripting for You!" on his blog Zen of Design:
"Ubiq’s law of scripting: Programmers always say, “No designer scripting!” This lasts until they see the production schedule."
I posted a comment about hybrid solutions which can frequently achieve many of the benefits of the individual solutions while minimizing the drawbacks. Basically, I suggest using data driven systems run by engineer-developed code as much as possible, and when additional scripting/feature coding is needed either have a scripter supervised by an engineer (via tech design, consultation, and code review) implement it for simpler cases, or an engineer implement it for more complex cases.
This could allow the use of more efficient and less error prone data driven system in most cases, while allowing scripting (code reviewed by software engineers) when needed when a more expressive solution is required.
More detail after the jump.
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