It is definitely a streamlined Maker, but that can be a good thing for n00bs. It has pre-built towns, houses, interiors, etc, that can then be customized, taking the guesswork out of what this tile or that tile is supposed to be used for. You'd have to go out of your way to make something truly ugly. It's also nice that right out of the box you can use any and all tiles on any and every map, except world maps which have their own tileset. I'll be honest, I think the map editor in FES blows away any computer RPG Maker map editor, with just one fatal flaw: the inability to import your own graphics. If Enterbrain would just include a decent map editor on their computer Makers this wouldn't be an issue, but frankly, they all suck.
The other nice feature is the move event command. Not only does it display on the map the the route the player or event will take, but it can also be set to either follow the route exactly with a start and end point of your choosing, or set to start at where the player or event is at and end at where you designate it to end. Can you do that in XP or VX or MV? I'm... sure you can with scripting but probably not out of the box (unless I'm missing something).
But it does have some serious problems, beyond the limitations. For one thing, the program will randomly crash for no apparent reason. I also encountered a huge problem which I'm almost positive NISA is well aware of (the US publisher) if not Enterbrain (but probably them to). From what I can gather, if you make something on one 3DS and then move the save file over to another 3DS, the game will think it's someone else's work. That's fine until you try to upload it and you can't. And then the game thinks you downloaded it and locks you out of editing your own damn game. Yeah, this happened to me.
So basically, if you're a scripter or really well-versed in the computer RPG Makers, then FES will seem rudimentary and unnecessary. But if you can put up with the random crashes and know about the bug I mentioned and don't do the things to encounter the bug, and if you want something that's easy to use, FES is a nice little program. I've made in hours things that would take weeks or months to do in XP. Hell, it's easy to get far along in game that in XP you'd still be looking around for plugins to make the game not so ugly and stupid.