If you select a well established engine, it is VERY likely that performance of the rules engine will be much better than performance of a system that access a database to retrieve and evaluate rules. The engine that we are using at the moment can evaluate about 2 million objects against a single complex rule in about 50 milliseconds. That's 2 million complex objects.
One of the features of an engine should be a UI that allows business people to create and manage their rules,not programmers. With proper engine, programmers SHOULD NOT create and manage rules, ever. You are probably looking at the open source engines (Drools, etc.) They generally miss this point. That's why you have an impression that your guys will have to learn Java in order to create business rules. That's a wrong assumption to begin with.
The entire point of a business rules engine is to abstract your business logic from the main code. Your database-based system does not offer the level of abstraction the normal BRE would. I don't know your system but I'm 99.9% positive on that, based on what I know about engines and "database rules systems". You need a database to store rules. That's all.
That depends on the engine you choose. Training is usually minimal for IT and somewhat mid-average for business.
Hope this helps.