I talk to a lot of startups about analytics and this is definitely a problem that needs solving. Doing lots and lots of external API calls is nontrivial at scale for someone who is "just a Rails app". Lots of startups need analytics but are still at "just a Rails app" stage. If you're already async it's easy but so many people aren't.

You're 150% right on your second point - people have no fucking clue how to get business value out of analytics. I am trying to blog about it to help solve the problem, but it's a tricky thing to teach.