Actually, my nephew plays with new-style ones a lot nowadays - you can actually just snap the pieces out and punch them back in.
That said, Rubik's Cubes are less about "being smart", and more about just memorizing specific patterns to solve them.
That’s debatable, especially with irregular shaped Rubiks puzzles where there isn’t exactly a well known set way to solve them, so you are stuck with working it out using group theory.