While this is true I would recommend using IT because you have to consider what the competition is doing and they definitely use more than a pen and a piece of paper. The best thing that happened to my trading career was a Master's in Quantitative Finance. The biggest mistake people make who want to make it in the trading business is they assume the only way to make money is to be long or short something. What about exploring something as simple as the correlation between say...the 5-year and 30-year. Is there something to be had by being long one and short the other? What about the correlation between Oil and Gold? And then there's managing your risk with options, which are highly mathematical and require IT if you want to explore the inefficiencies of this market. The opportunities the market offers are limited only by your imagination and your mathematical acumen. A little programming knowledge and a lot of math goes a long way!
Tradestation was the original platform which enabled RAD of strategies....you could write and test them literally in minutes. Multicharts is the successor. You've got to be able to program however.
I have Amibroker and, like the thread starter, not a big fan of their scripting language. But, it's probably the fastest and most feature-rich backtester you can find in a fixed cost, sub-300 buck product. The only workaround for this to help alleviate the frustration (and still use it) is to give http://www.dotnetforab.com/ a try. There's a free edition available. Other than that, yeah, Tradestation or MultiCharts (both use EasyLanguage) is probably where you're headed. Then again, I'm a discretionary intraday futures trader with 25+ years of programming experience who manually backtests new trading ideas...so go figure.