Steem Engine is certainly the easiest one I have come across to create a token on. The price really isn't bad, the listing part is really cheap, staking and extra features cost more but if you had a blockchain developer fork the Dash code or something and set up staking and modify the wallet for you, you would pay several thousand.

We started by creating the BuildTeam token on Bitshares, it was around the same price 600 BTS or so, but I can't remember if you need to be a lifetime member which costs 3000 BTS.

The advantages of Bitshares is that their tokens can now be indexed on Coingecko, Steem Engine tokens can't be indexed anywhere atm so while they are fine for community tokens and as an SMT stopgap they aren't idea for larger or more serious projects due to lack of indexing.

Our BUILDTEAM tokens are dual listed on both Steem Engine and Bitshares but the Coingecko indexer only reflects the Bitshares market which is and issue as the Steem Engine price and volume isn't factored in.

I would highly recommend Steem Engine completes this form using the Exchange Listing option http://bit.ly/CGRequestForm so that it can benefit all of Steem Engine tokens with discovery and indexing.

Edit: Also by being indexed on Coingecko, it allowed icoholder.com to add our project and include token price data and charts etc, see this announce post.