Boy, I really have a different opinion of enterprise software. The number and complexity of all of the various cases is astounding! To make it worse, they frequently come with no underlying framework, so you have to extrapolate and hope that you don't bake in something that's going to change next week.
IMO, making that software to handle the business processes IS way more valuable to the business than a drag and drop widget framework. Especially if you execute it well, it can make the business hum.
Enterprise software is not complex because it needs to be it's complex because the east way to deal with complexity is to create a complex system. Take the database design for my current project when I joined the project the database design had over 500 tables for a brand new system. But, by making a few minor design changes I cut several hundred tables from the design without sacrificing anything. At one point I removed 30 tables by adding a single field to a single table.
PS: Yes, copy and paste is easy, and yes it looks like work, but it's rarely the correct solution.
See my other reply below to toyg, if your company is writing a lot of similar software your going to have to start making flexible standard stuff rather than rewriting it every time.
But I agree with you if you're going in with a blank slate.
IMO, making that software to handle the business processes IS way more valuable to the business than a drag and drop widget framework. Especially if you execute it well, it can make the business hum.