Simple tools are not in and of themselves hindrances to creativity -- in many cases, excess complexity does not equate to increased creativity. Heck, scripts and batch files are very simple tools, but over the years I had tremendous success saving time and effort with both.
Broken tools on the other hand, are _dangerous_, and should be either disposed of, deliberately ignored, or locked away. The Action Recorder is a perfect example of a tool that was broken by design. Whoever was involved with defining the scope of work for that programming effort evidently had little to no experience in either CAD production or CAD management. The tool does a poor job from either perspective, and as such is less useful than nothing. As Ed noted, the inability to maintain the action recorder macros is a huge hindrance. why waste time working on a macro that is not extensible or otherwise maintainable. Better to teach the student simple commandline lisp (getpoint) (getdist) (setq) etc.
Claiming that this tool is an implementation of the long standing AUGI wish list is at best disingenuous. No one that I'm aware of asked for a black hole recorder....