ERP platforms that both run the world AND that have modern UX do exist. Take a look at Fusion, which covers all kinds of things from supply chain management, ri

ERP platforms that both run the world AND that have modern UX do exist. Take a look at Fusion, which covers all kinds of things from supply chain management, risk management, oil and gas industry specific stuff, banking specific stuff, you name it. https://www.oracle.com/erp/financial-close-product-tour/ https://www.oracle.com/erp/financial-close-product-tour/ https://www.oracle.com/erp/risk-management/#tour https://www.oracle.com/erp/risk-management/#tour It's a bunch of web apps, basically. So the trite answer is, "when you go apply for a job at Oracle or SAP and upgrade some old screens to modern standards". If you want software to be higher quality in general then you need to work on frameworks. Either GUI frameworks, or stuff that helps people get things right at a deeper level without a big lift. I've been doing this sort of thing for quite a few years now. As one example, a big issue identified in this thread is GUIs that are slow and throw away keyboard input vs the often more productive (but harder to learn) TUIs of yesteryear. You can get both easily enough but it means going outside the web to use a GUI toolkit designed for the desktop, JavaFX would be a good choice. Although you can make these sorts of UIs using the web, it'd require a ton of sketchily maintained React libraries and the like. What you'll find if you try this is that although the desktop GUI toolkits themselves are alright, distribution is much harder than on the web. The tooling all sucks and the experience is painful, especially if you don't want to enforce an OS requirement on your users. So after I identified that problem some years ago, I sat down and wrote a tool that makes desktop/CLI app distribution way easier: http://hydraulic.dev http://hydraulic.dev Now it's as easy to ship a desktop app as a web app (more or less, once you have bought signing keys). Want three levels of nested menus that can be navigated with a few keypresses? Want a nested table view with easily resized and reordered columns? Want an ultra-low UI, all with modern languages and capabilities? Well now you can do it and deployment won't kill you. That's a little bit of boulder-pushing progress towards balancing "functional" and "sleek", for you. This pattern also opens up a bunch of other simplifications. For instance, you can use your database as an app server. Just connect to it directly using JDBC drivers or similar, and give every user a DB account. Use the DB's security mechanisms (views, stored procedures etc) to implement access control and now you don't need to develop and run a web server layer. Just run queries and map the results directly into your UI toolkit. This works better if you are using a feature rich database. I've tried it with Postgres and the results were unsatisfactory, I think it'd work better with something like Oracle or MS SQL Server. And you wouldn't build a social network that way. But in an enterprise context it can be a nice simplification and enable much lower latency UI than in a typical web app.