Great article. As a front end visual designer, I have used Visual Composer WP bakery and all in between. Elementor gives complete control of elements on a page without CSS bloat. It is miles ahead of the rest and end result is great.
Once you know how to use it well you can create any effect.
3rd party plugins that piggyback on Elementor are the icing on the cake. Their ready pages help designers like me whip up a landing page in 30 minutes or so.

When and if they go solo I would go to them for their SAAS. Unless WP gets UI UX designers and enters into the foray they will lag behind.