In my opinion, it is not so much about wanting the configured products to be going through a extensive 'creation, reviewing, releasing and accepting' flow like you would do for a regular 'Engineered' product: you want to 'configure' a product via a model and be able to sell it right-away. The configuration model is supposed to guarantee the validity of the result so it can be used on a transaction immediately. The point of supporting 'Engineering' is that the starting point of such a configured product (a variant) may be a product that IS engineered and may be based off of a certain Version even (determined perhaps by the configurator model version you used to configure a new variant) and to be able to track that relationship. I would need to better understand the forthcoming support for variant creation in 10.0.21/22 to get this clearer but it is certainly a scenario that needs to be supported in some way (rather than having to setup a separate, non-engineered product in parallel to be able to configure)