[jamesbritt]

It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype.

I think you're grossly undervaluing that.

Painting by numbers, as goofy as it seems, allows relatively non-skilled people to create approximations of art. For some, that's enough. For others, that taste of making a painting motivates them to want to do more. Just getting people to pick up a paint brush and mess around with some paints can be an amazing trigger.

The social aspect may help people see that, having assembled some basic Arduino thing, they could make it do a few other cool things, and other people like themselves (i.e. non-geeks) have done it, and will show them how.