AHK is great from what I've seen. It's AutoIt that's the problem. AHK was originally a fork of the FOSS version of AutoIt, before AutoIt went closed and proprietary.

A lot of the toxicity on the AutoIt forum seems to come from the grossly overinflated egos of few core participants (some of which appear to be employees in some capacity). Reading through the forum, you can easily get the impression these people believe AutoIt is better than sliced bread or something... and anyone needing to ask a question is simply dumb.

It's rotten to the core. People should use AHK whenever possible.