Arguments for/against using a third party "Rapid development environment"?

I just started working for a company that uses a "Rapid Development Environment" (RDE) supplied by a third party. The idea is that you can specify things like: "display data in grid", "datasource", "sort by" and it generates an a ASP.NET application that does all of those things.

I'm personally not a huge fan for the following reasons:

• You are at the mercy of the RDE with regards to what level of control you have. For example there is no try/catch/fail mechanism.
• If there is a bug in the RDE there is nothing you can do, you have to wait for them to release a fix.
• I'm not sure that it speeds things up all that much.
• There is no way you are going to find someone with X years of experience using some backwoods RDE. Every new employee is starting from scratch
• You can't integrate many common tools with it. Source control would be an example of this. While i'm sure I could tak开发者_StackOverflowe the EXTREAMLY verbose xml files used to generate the application and manually insert them into Source control there is no way for me to just right click and checkin. Even if I do that there would be nothing meaningful displayed if you do a diff...

Has anyone found these things useful? They seem like a gimic to keep costs down to me...

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I don't use any tool/framework/environment/etc that I cannot bypass whenever I want to. I don't care how good the product looks on paper or what impressing demos I'm shown.

If the product isn't mature and expressive enough to offer the possibility to work around it or hack/plug into it, I'll pass.