I recently had just the opposite experience with ADE.
Thinking it was primarily for creating and modifying airports, I never really looked into the capabilities of this powerful utility until I recently got a bug to place some of my helicopter related scenery objects in the Grand Canyon in my installation of FSX SE, for which my prior favorite object placement utility, Instant Scenery 2, was now useless.
Following Jon's advice in the FSX SE forum at Steam, I downloaded and flawlessly installed the appropriate P3D SDK, then downloaded and installed ADE without incident, and got all of the tools pointed in the right directions. Again, having never seen the ADE UI, I figured out how to add my objects and had my first landing tower installed at KGCN within about a half hour.
Truth be told, I missed the "what you see is what you get" UI of IS2, and was reminded of the good old days with Rwy12 and my trusty Crosshairs_plus placement aircraft, so bringing my CH+ fleet out of retirement, I was able to hit the ground running.
Actually, when placing a landing tower on a pinnacle in the Grand Canyon, the IS2 WYSIWYG UI was never all that effective for "landing" the object to be placed in the right spot sticking up above the canyon floor below. Like skyscrapers in the city, first you had to get the object at the right altitude.
At any rate, I am delighted with ADE, especially its unforeseen ability to add the placed objects to the FSX Map page, which is a major improvement over IS2 and makes a huge difference in locating my landing towers in the immensity of the Grand Canyon.
(EDIT: I am also pretty darned happy to be able to quickly place a small flatten on top of my Grand Canyon pinnacles, which may actually make ADE faster than IS2 for placing my helicopter towers in unusual locations)
Thank You Jon!!!
Best regards from a new "customer".
Cheers
Gary