> What is the market for "wide" applications though?

Just my experience, but essentially these target industries, not necessarily consumers or singular entities. Hence the term "enterprise". As someone who worked on a fairly reasonable ERP for academic purposes, even just calculating a GPA is extremely complicated in the backend:

    * There are multiple schemes for calculating GPAs
    * Each scheme needs to support multiple grading types (A-F, pass/fail, etc)
    * Each scheme needs to support multiple rounding rules
    * Displays of GPAs will need to be scaled properly based on the output context
    * GPA values will need to be normalized for use in calculations in other parts of the system
    * State legislatures mandate state-specific usages of GPAs which must be honored for legal compliance
    * All GPA calculations must have historical context in case the rules changes so that old transcripts can be revived correctly
    * Institutions themselves will have custom rules (maybe across schools or departments) for calculations which must be incorporated into everything else
    * This pretty much has to work every time

I don't know exactly how many tables GPAs themselves took, but overall the system was over 4,000 tables and 10,000+ stored procedures/functions. Also, I worked in the State of Texas which has its own institution-supported entity performing customizations to this ERP for multiple universities that are installed separately but required for full compliant operation.

I would compare this to most modern "tall" applications which would more-than-likely offer you maybe up to 3 different GPA options with some basic data syncing or something. They might offer multiple rounding types if they thought that far. These apps are generally extremely niche and typically work for very basic workloads. They can capture a lot of easy value for entry-level stuff but immediately fail at everything else.