You are correct, the Force.com part of the Salesforce platform is particularly well suited for database centric business applications, that may or may not be re

You are correct, the Force.com part of the Salesforce platform is particularly well suited for database centric business applications, that may or may not be related to Salesforce's Sales, Service or Marketing clouds (the core SaaS of Salesforce). To do it with POJ + Spring or ASP.net means there is a ton of wheel that you need to re-invent, especially around security, reliability, data protection/sharing, user management and so on. If you go ahead and to a couple of the trails in Trailhead this will start to become more obvious.