100% agreed. Any engine that is more beginner friendly then others (RPG Maker, Construct, GameMaker, ClickTeam Fusion, etc) is going to get a bad rep from some people who encounter a lot of wonky games made by beginners with that engine. A spurious correlation.
I found that getting experienced with such an engine (and it’s limitations) will turbocharge your development speed, which is exactly what you want if you want to focus on game design and trying out things quickly. Maybe you’re doing a gamejam, turning a sticky note into a prototype, or working on a bigger project but doing iterations instead of making big plans.
(Damn, I’m rambling on about this a bit, maybe I should turn this into a blog post or something :D)