A larval developer's gateway project is all but guaranteed to end up as an incomprehensible mess of spaghetti that'll fall to pieces at the lightest touch after a summer of plugging away at it, but that's not what's important. What's important is that they could make something -- something real. By the time it's left as a shambling pile of kluges and bad practices that'll never see the light of day again, it's still gotten far enough to inspire something, and serves as a great point to move on to greater ambitions -- or even start from scratch with one's lessons learned and make it better, perhaps with a more advanced toolset that now seems infinitely more approachable than it did at the beginning.
This isn't a discussion about tools to create software that'll be refined, depended on, and passed on to new developers over the span of years. It's about bridging the gap between restrictive toys and actual non-trivial projects for novices to tinker with.
And raises the barrier to maintenance.