What's the bad sign there? If juniors are reaching for RF as a first-pass over say, (logistic) regression, that seems like a _great_ sign; no other approach has such a high average performance-effort ratio. For non-huge, naturally tabular problems, it usually takes me 10x or more the effort to beat the very first RF I train. Developer time matters!
If they start going to GBM's or neural nets first...I'd call _that_ a bad sign (and it happens).
If they start going to GBM's or neural nets first...I'd call _that_ a bad sign (and it happens).