Yeah I think I'm still lucky though, my first mined coin doesn't go to zero, yet . I think it's useless if you want to jump to mining but not experience it first hand, so I give it a try.
Experience is a great teacher indeed and I agree about the risk management, especially for a newbie. I most likely got more stress if go all in with all of my funds.
The main reason why mining is interesting for newbies is very simple - they hear about cryptocurrency and that it can be mining. This is enough so that they have a question about the relevance of whether he can do it =)