Here. Hats off to Scott for coming out and saying all that. The sad part is that vendors like BEA and IBM and pushing new Java developers towards a similar visual editor type of tools and approach, which I obviously don't think is a good idea (except in the sense that they might be able to sell all sorts of hot air products to their unexpecting victims).
Not an unreasonable request...
The problem I see with visual editors is that they are often accumulating a huge amount of complexity unbeknownst to the poor developer, and when the day comes that the framework does not bend far enough, all hell breaks loose as you uncover all that complexity.
In other words, and based on my personal experience with some visual tools like VS.NET and a couple of Java/Swing GUI builders, the tools available to us are making unreasonable assumptions about their use. Everything is peachy until you need to lift that hood and when you do, you can't figure out what the heck is inside. Well, you can but it is rather painful.
As with all things, there are good uses for such tools (e.g. prototyping) but--in my opinion--enterprise application development is not one of them as long as the resulting code is not human-readable.