It's all relative, I can give you examples of why I would consider this helpful and you can perhaps help me decide what paths I could follow.

My father is a Biologist, who once learned enough to write a few lines in Q-Basic, eventually some C. He doesn't care much about what's "under the hood", but he sometimes needs to develop a few simple routines to calculate animal ratios and stuff faster than running calc or Excel and doing all the math himself (with all the error that could yield). He'd be able to do that, but when I showed him the tools he'd have to use, he literally ran away! =)
As we all know, the tip of the iceberg itself is complicated enough when we talk about VS. On the other hand I do know how (and like) to develop stuff, and could make things easyer for him by taking all the "complicated" stuff out of the way.

Not everyone who writes software is a software writer/engineer/enthusiast! Myself included! I'm an electronics engineer, who more than once wished he'd have a simple UI to drag and drop buttons and frames around to create simple web pages, have a USB send and receive data and control stuff, and had to learn a lot more to be able to use Visual Studio, when it wasn't my actual intention. Not that I'm complaining anyway, I consider it a very valuable asset.

That said, I agree with you both that for the case of someone who is learning a new programing language, it is important to know the whys of a lot of things, but for that case, the context is somehow different.