Yeah, you definitely have a point there. While many problems have a high degree of inherent complexity, there are plenty of others that don't need to and that

Yeah, you definitely have a point there. While many problems have a high degree of inherent complexity, there are plenty of others that don't need to and that have features bolted on left and right to appeal to every possible market. And it's definitely true that big companies hate making these sorts of decisions, because it's expensive and time-consuming and difficult to undo. One reason a lot of enterprise software gets bloated is that, in order for the market to be viable, it's hard to just target a single niche, so you end up with a superset of features so that you can sell the same market to customers with different requirements. Even in the best case, though, system specialization can be a knife-edge that cuts both ways. Many of our customers, for example, are in a trouble precisely because they have way, way too many one-off systems. They have this system over here that does just workers comp claims, and another system for handling personal auto claims, and another system for tracking notes, and an entirely different system for first notice of less entry versus for actually handling claims, and then most of their commercial business is in yet another system, except for some specialty lines that are elsehwere. Then they have five different policy administration systems, and a couple of billing systems, and each of those talks to a different document production system . . . it's a total nightmare. So sometimes the choice is between having 3 complex systems or 25 purpose-built systems and a total integration and user training nightmare, and both options suck. Basically, as soon as you have a bunch of data that you need to do a ton of different things with, you're left with two bad choices: you can create one really complex application that tries to do everything, or you can create a bunch of smaller applications and end up with a bunch of complicated integrations. Fundamentally, as soon as you have complex data that you have to do a bunch of stuff with, you're going to be in trouble no matter what you do.