I think I'm agreeing with you, but I think that 99% of people who end up using AWS SES will find they'll need to write a bunch of handling code on top of it to deal with bounces (i.e. if your bounce rate is high, SES will kill your ability to send emails).

I found it incredibly frustrating that there was functionality that should have been easy for SES to implement, and that pretty much everyone will need at some point, but they don't really make it easy to add on after the fact.