On Sunday, March 13, 2016 at 12:00:57 PM UTC-4, RichA wrote:
On Sunday, 13 March 2016 11:02:57 UTC-4, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Sun, 13 Mar 2016 06:55:30 -0700 (PDT), wsnell01 wrote:

They provide a cheap and accessible way for a newbie to gauge his or her interest in amateur astronomy!

Or, alternatively, they turn people off of astronomy completely.

Most of the people I know who got into astronomy and stayed there
started with either Dobs or goto SCTs. Most of the people I know who
explored astronomy starting with a department store telescope now have
a department store telescope in their closet (or have given it to
Goodwill) and don't observe.

I'd be the exception to that and I believe anyone truly interested (as
opposed to those who saw a Hubble Jupiter shot and wanted a quick thrill) will keep at it. Having said that, I think parents who spend thousands a year on their cellphones and who balk at spending few hundred on a scope for a truly interested kid either don't have the money or are too cheap to spend it wisely.

I would suggest that the other poster's sample is decidedly biased, not representative of reality.

Let's say that two million telescopes are sold each year in the US. Most of those would be small, basic scopes well under $100. Using the dogma that a "decent scope should cost at least $400," if everyone spent that much then the amount of extra money spent would be 2x10^6 * ~$350 = ~$700 million per year. That doesn't seem like much but that would be money diverted from other purposes.

If two million scopes are sold per year then perhaps we would have two million newbies asking questions of existing amateur astronomers. Assuming that
there might be only about 50,000 active astronomy club members in the US, each such member would be called upon to attend to the needs of forty or so newbies each year! That might triple the clubs' meeting attendance each month. Where are all of those newbies going to park?

After all of that, how many newbies will even stick with the hobby despite the hand-holding?

Admittedly, the above is a sort of "worst-case" scenario, but still.