I was fortunate enough to see and hear Randy Pausch describe Alice's development in a lecture at CMU while he was still alive. I remember it being quite compelling as he discussed teaching young kids concurrency by animating a figure skater pirouetting on screen and the fact that the language made this straightforward compared to say, how this would be implemented in C++, for instance.

The problem, of course, is that the very affordance in a language like Alice that makes it approachable for novices are exactly the same constraints and limitations that drive experts insane.

The following is worth noting from the Wikipedia link you included:

"Alice is designed to appeal to specific subpopulations not normally exposed to computer programming, such as students of middle school age, by encouraging storytelling. Alice is also used at many colleges and universities in Introduction to Programming courses."

My point is simply that Alice seems like the wrong tool for the wrong age group as described by your experience but it's definitely not the right approach for someone who will major in computer science later.