Historically, structured editors have gotten a bad rap for being modal. Being locked in situations like you've entered an IF and you have to type in a condition that's a valid boolean expression before you can move on--that sort of thing.
A painful example from my childhood:
If your opinion of structured editors is formed by things that work like this (and many people's are), I would understand being skeptical. They do not feel much like a "canvas" on which you are coding freely.
When you can code freely and the system is assisting you in translating that into structure if and when you want to, then it is pure benefit.
// Right now I am trying to go around and study uses of the word in
// and it's very frustrating, because it's such a common word...yet I
// want to use it, but it gets lost in the noise. Intentional Programming
// allowed you to not just point to the right IN and then search by underlying
// UUID, but you could also "intentionalize comments", much how I'm
// "intentionalizing" references here. I could write a Rebol program and
// talk about IN with a UUID, and then in the comments of the C++
// implementing it I could point at that specific intent. Rename it, it changes.
// Want to study the instances, you can find them with accuracy.
// Comments reflow with word wrap correctly of course because the // are
// just rendering artifacts, but not the best option, because there are many
// other ways to show the paragraphs (in the margins, connected directly
// to the exact AST points they want to document, showable by demand...)
We simply need more powerful tools for storing our hardened software intent, and text alone does not cut it. Being able to point at things and say "I mean that", and have "that" persist, is critical. And there are all kinds of things you can do with keeping a legacy name alive for some deprecation period... so it works for rendering with a squiggle but not lookup, but when the new name is committed it doesn't break anything. If you're afraid to rename things so they are more clear because you might break something, that's the tip of the iceberg of what it means to be crippled by fear of improvement...
Related: Alan Kay, speaking on how software engineering makes great CAD tools for other mediums, and then uses a typewriter to do their own work. (via @jhgorse)