Correct me if I'm wrong, but bitmap strikes are primarily intended for providing hand-drawn versions of glyphs for resolutions where automatic rasterization may not be readable. The documentation is kind enough to remark that you may run into support issues if your font contains no outlines at all, which is perhaps why the rest of the tools mentioned settle for generating outlines for exported pixels when targeting TTF/OTF (I wrote a small explanation of the algorithm used in mine).
All in all, positive reception suggests that plenty of people found the tool to be an improvement over alternatives, but perhaps we all have our own standards.