I know what you mean about diving into the power via scripting... I found the same thing with Excel and VBA. I'm pretty sure you can do anything with Excel and VBA.
But that's the thing... I could almost literally do all of this with Excel and VBA... but it is cumbersome. It's not a graphics tool, but as you can map images to button objects, you CAN do some fancy layering and get interactivity all at the same time.
It's just that you wouldn't want to 
It seems to me that I have discovered a basic type of computing functionality that has not been addressed.
Like word processing has been addressed.
Painting (bitmap or SVG) has been addressed.
Calculations have been addressed.
But think about this:
ALL interaction with computing devices today (with the rarest exceptions... like speaking to them and listening to them), are basically looking at graphical elements on a screen, and interacting with them. All of it. From web browsers to Super Mario to video editors... it's all "shapes" with attributes. (I prefer the term "entities"... as shapes is too limited).
You would think that a tool that allows you to define entities and interact with them would be almost the most basic tool you could find on a modern, GUI oriented device.
Make an entity... define how it looks... define how it behaves.
If you had an application that did that... then you could almost literally do anything because that is all anything on a PC really is (3D rendering is a notable exception... the techniques to do that effectively are well defined and available).
What excited my about Hype is that it understands the power of having a physics system that can be applied. It understands that entities can collide.
It should, IMHO, understand 2D lighting. It should understand deep appearance attributes... basically an SVG toolset, with deep texturing and other related tools at the ready... with emphasis on effects.
And sure, at some point... scripting is always king, but just think about how far you could go short of that.
If you want to see a great example of a pretty wild tool that merged vector and raster graphics with insane effects and style elements... Real Draw Pro was an overlooked gem. A bit dated now, but you can see the power...

But all of these tools are designed to produce static results... the entities are not available to the user.
So Hype is clearly trying to address that...
But one day, when someone realizes that IF you make a tool that creates entities that can be dynamically changed in every way... that can interact with the user and all other entities... then you will have a tool that can almost literally do anything.
The problem seems to be that applications that sort of do this have an idea about what the end result supposed to be (like a 2D game engine... it assumes you are making a game) and therefore the tools are not generalized.
But a generalized tool that does entities and interactions... is really a do anything tool. Because interacting with visual entities is all anything really is... in the end.
-R-