It does have value, especially for people who have spent decades programming in HyperCard-style environments. This is not really a new "develop for idiots" type tool - it is based on a very long tradition that started with the original HyperCard, a tool that was beloved by many and used a style and approach that has largely died out. For former HyperCarders it is probably a last refuge. And it is also a good tool to help some people learn basic programming and be productive without getting turned off...it's less intimidating for some people than the alternatives. That's part of what was neat about HyperCard: average people creating cool, useful programs without even necessarily wanting to be programmers or thinking of themselves as programmers.

RunRev is proprietary, weird, and not something a younger web coder would probably want to pick up, but it does have its niche. People that are already experts in HyperCard, of course. Small desktop publishers/shareware developers who would otherwise use something like RealBasic. (It has a similar small ecosystem of third-party add-ons.) People that want a tool that lets them make desktop apps with web, database, and multimedia capabilities - without having to learn all the nitty-gritty details they might otherwise have to. Etc. You can make cross-platform apps with less headaches than many other more mainstream tools because of its runtime. It's a great prototyping tool (faster than anything else I've seen, even today) and people often ended up being able to ship their 'prototypes' because the mock-ups used native (or native-looking) controls. The execution speed was very fast the last time I used it...the core engine was written in C. As I noted in another post, it beat Perl for some text-processing tasks the last time I used it. It delivered solid cross-platform capabilities years ago - way before Java realized any of its heralded 'WORA' benefits.

In many ways, MetaCard/RunRev was a "Beating the Averages" tool for me at one point. I could create software in literally a fraction of the time it took my competitors, my software had fewer bugs, more capabilities, and it ran just as fast if not faster than their C++ monstrosities. And mine ran on Windows, Mac, and Unix - while theirs usually just ran on Windows. And they had a professional programming team, while I was a single developer with fairly limited skills. Naturally, I did everything I could to keep my tool a secret ;-) I eventually drifted away from it because I got more into web stuff, and it is not ideally suited to the web. (Or at least it wasn't at the time - and I don't see much that has truly changed in that regard, RunRev marketing aside.)

I know people who make a full-time living using it, and at least a couple guys that have made millions using it. (One of my social science professors in college - who had no prior programming experience - even started a successful software company on the side with MetaCard/RunRev. He made desktop software for creating surveys and reports in the academic community. It was a specialized tool for surveys, but the report engine put Crystal Reports to shame. He was making nearly half a million a year from it at his peak. The guys I know who made millions using it were all either professional programmers or had them on staff, though.) I haven't use it in a few years, and I definitely think that it is a mistake to try to hype it as a great language/tool for web apps - because it is not - but I do think it has value for certain users/uses.