[ShamelessC]

Midjourney != DALLE2

One has a much smaller customer base than the other and effectively amounts to, as you suggest, a hype club that finetunes open works and monetizes by giving early access to members.

The other is backed by Microsoft and currently scales to 100,000 users.

To answer your question - not everyone spent their time learning to master art and design. The idea that this is stuff is trivial and devoid of value for a beginner is non-sense. It is useful anytime a coder is in need of custom assets matching an English description. Will it offend some artistic sensibilities? Probably, but have you looked around lately? Nobody cares about that anyway, unfortunately.