Then again, I'm calling these people technical, apparently it's a simpler game now with scripts that any regular Joe (or his 14-year old kid) can run.
Because the point isn't to cause damage to the user in any way (usually), but rather to (some combination of) 1) show off your skills, 2) embarrass the site owners, 3) get a message out, 4) have bragging rights. It's generally a fairly non-destructive practice, just silly.
What would give them more technical credibility in you eyes? If they wrote the attack themselves? In C? In Assembly? We all automate the hell out of things and lean toward the highest level languages for server automation anyway, why demean them when everything is a 'simpler game now with scripts that any regular Joe can run.' Have you seen Chef or Puppet, Flask or Rails?
A hacker doesn't care what the way is. He thinks about the goal, the end result.
If there's a ready-made script that can help or do it for him? Sure why not?
Having said that I agree that it does require skill and it is not as easy as downloading some random scripts and typing in a website and pressing the 'hack' button.
Tagging - an ugly pointless form of graffiti is popular for similar reasons. It's easy to do, and more tags == more credit among a small group of peers.
It's a good thing that people want to deface websites rather than hunker down and learn the long game. We'd be in real trouble if all the people doing minor stuff turned to major cyber[1] crime.
[1] "cyber" feels so old to me. Neuromancer was written in 1984.