of course we are all entitled to our opinions and mine is that pro is excellent for beginners. i say this after providing 200 of the cheapies to several lab classes of engineering students. they are available with pins pre-installed but i thought it better to introduce some basic solder skills. my method involves mounting pins across the top of the pad instead of through the hole and only two out of hundreds failed to boot. and no lifted pads. the headers have even been removed on a few occasions w/o that happening.
as far as random pinout the actual "pro-mini" pads on the sides are consistent on all units ive purchased from many different asian sources, both ebay and aliexpress. only the enhanced signals like extra adc channels and serial varied and this was for improvement over the original sparkfun design. the current design also supports jumper selectable 3.3v or 5v operation which is another major improvement.
so considering you can buy a dozen of these for the cost of a "real" arduino i highly recommend for beginners. if the official pro-mini, which was not designed by arduino btw, would compete in terms of cost and features i would recommend it.