It's true, but, to quote Dr Ben Goldacre, "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that." Meccano (and Merkur) use proper fasteners. So, you're le

It's true, but, to quote Dr Ben Goldacre, "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that." Meccano (and Merkur) use proper fasteners. So, you're learning useful life skills with the fiddly bits. But that also means the joins are much stronger, so you can build working machines that can handle real loads in Meccano. Meta-but: when you do this, you discover that the thin metal plates are not strong. So, you need to learn to build box section structures and so on, which in itself is a real-life engineering skill which can help if you later go on to building structures from real-world materials such as metal tubing, wood, bamboo, etc. So yes, the fiddliness is a pain, but it's an educational pain that leads to more learning... Until you end up with the skills to build multi-meters-tall objects and working machinery. Whereas Lego doesn't scale up well. Even large Lego sculptures, which are mostly static and unmoving, not machines, must be glued together. But that means you have to do un-glued test builds, get it right, then tear it down and repeat the entire process but with adhesives. Above fairly trivial level, what Lego teaches is bad practices and bad engineering. Which is not a criticism of Lego! It's a toy and meant to be one, and it's a great one. But building complex machines is not what it was meant for -- whereas that's exactly what Meccano is good for.