S&box is essentially Garry's Mod 2, but we haven't seen any updates in a long time, its game on engine (UE4 right now) and build a hotloading C# layer on top of it. The idea being that you will never have to touch C++, you never have to wait for things to compile, you never have to close the game while developing.
We're hoping that what we're making is engine agnostic. Our goal was to build this on top of Source 2, but that seems unlikely now - as it's doubtful that would have any actual benefit over what we're currently doing.
Gmod is a very cool sandbox.. It is cool due to the import of models, etc. There is still no engine with a good base.. And you shouldn 't expect this from UE ..