I precluded that, with "if you feel you need to use an appraisal tool"
and from my perspective, none of those you mentioned, are appraisal tools.
imo...
How is a comps database not an appraisal tool? It's literally the only appraisal tool in this industry worth looking at. Comps are the foundation for pretty much every appraisal in every industry that has them, be it domains, Real Estate, art, you name it. You can't appraise the price of something accurately without knowing what similar items have sold for, otherwise you're just pulling a number out of thin air.
Even if you have intimate knowledge of the industry that the domain serves, you probably wouldn't be able to do it. Go ask a CEO with no domain aftermarket knowledge what a domain that is perfect for his business is worth, he won't be able to give you a good answer. He'll probably say $500 or less. Maybe if he's really smart he might be able to put a dollar value on the benefits it would bring to his business, apply a reasonable multiple to it, and come up with a sane number. But probably not if we're being realistic, otherwise it wouldn't be so difficult to sell domains, even ones that are good.
There's a reason that when looking at our traffic logs, the absolute biggest users by a mile are all the big brokerage houses and marketplaces. They use comps to justify prices to their buyers, and it works. If they do it and they have centuries worth of experience on their teams, certainly a newbie should be doing it.
Granted there are no truly good automated appraisals out there, but that is because they aren't good at filtering and digesting the sales data and knowing which are truly comparable and to what degree. I'm not 100% convinced software could ever do that. It is not a reflection on the usefulness of comps to a human.
Nobody was born knowing how to appraise a domain name, not even you. While you're probably pretty good at it, that is based on decades of experience and hundreds of negotiations under your belt, hearing about the sales other have made, and so on. Newbies don't have that luxury.
There are only two choices for a newbie. You can learn the long and hard way through trial and error, and probably burn a lot of money making mistakes. Learning what sells and for how much, and what doesn't sell, by buying 4-5 domains and trying to sell them might work but it will take an eternity. Or the other alternative is that you can get decades worth of experience just by reading what others have done.
While your poem was super cute, the message was misguided. If you left it at not relying entirely on automated appraisals it would have been sage advice. But not using any tools is just silly. And even automated appraisals add value to the equation, even if that value isn't in the dollar amount they spit out.
Someone who has no experience appraising domains and has no sales under their belt should absolutely make use of tools to help them. Not just comps although that is the most important starting point, but also ones others have mentioned, like Google to see how many companies might use it, SpyFu to determine demand and commercial appeal, DomainTools to see how many other extensions are registered, and so on. Some domains might require other tools in addition, like a given name you'd want to know how many people have that name. For a Geo you might want to know population, median house values, salary level, tourism numbers, and so on. For a prodserv you might want to see how interest is trending over time.
That said, none of those supplemental tools actually help you put a real number on a domain name in a vacuum. They only help you determine which comps are really close and which aren't. You can't say "Oh, this domain has seven large end users, thus it is worth $xx,xxx" without using any sales data at all.
Even if you have a lot of experience in the domain industry, you don't know everything and could still benefit from doing similar research. It might not be worth the effort since most of the time you'll get it right, but certainly not always. As Joe said you can't know everything about everything.