I guess every approach has its own trade-offs. One of the big advantages of a Rebol-ish language is its extreme flexibility. So, on one hand, you can do many (weird) things super-easily, but one the other hand, it has to be handled with... caution.
The debate is pretty much like compiled vs interpreted. There is something to gain and something to lose. Personally, I started out considering every intepreted language as "not a real thing" (my first one was Pascal in 1993-1994 - not a great example, I know, but still a static typed compiled one), but slowly grew up to love them - especially since the machines they run on got better and better to the point that their lack in perfomance wasn't that significant anymore. In any case, I think it boils down to the use case in mind.
