I personally saw many Filemaker users build pretty impressive apps. App Maker was trying to be more powerful and more general, and so we opened up scripting a lot more than what you saw in Filemaker or MS Access, but it never achieved the full original vision or ease-of-use there. Scripting was a giant escape hatch for features that should have been built-into core, and the scripting features themselves didn't evolve enough. Managing scripts and using dependencies were extremely rudimentary.