Could you talk about some concrete examples?
Customer: "Could you make the 'name' field of this entity longer? We need to add longer names."
Me: "Why?"
Customer: "Well, we want to name the entity '2022 - Spring - $500k - Contoso Inc. - Presale stage' so we can find it more easily."
Me: "So what you actually want is to be able to filter/search for entities by all those values, and you're just using the name as a workaround because it's all you have."
Customer: "Well that's how we do it in Excel."
To date, it's still incredibly searchable. Want to find a 5.5" phone running Android 10+ and at least a 12MP back-facing camera for below $350? You can filter for it.
It was an absolute nightmare on the (normalized, backend) technical level, but a real pleasure to consume on the denormalized, frontend level.
But they all come at some cost - my employer decided to cheap out slash invest in a highly custom in-house solution instead that relied on lots and lots and lots of data entry.
It doesn't matter that you can add any fields you want in Salesforce, and we do, nobody will use them and continue to encode all the information in the title of the object.
Because the person managing Salesforce approved all requests to add any field, there were just 400 instead of the 5 I mentioned, and none had any validation - so no one knew which ones to fill with data, which ones to keep updated, and which ones absolutely to never touch because you would accidentally commit fraud because you falsified sales figures.
That company considered exactly that kind of experience to be one of their "trade secrets," and they were fairly well-known for "leaning into" customer mental models.
Even though I could legally discuss it, I won't. I feel they could use all the help they can get, right now, and I won't make things harder for them.