That's the point, though. Enterprise software is a superset (E) of all features that a large group of very diverse customers need.
An individual customer has a need for a much smaller set of features (C). That enterprise software may very well be the best software that includes all those needed features:
C ⊆ E
How come you can't have something nice & even decently working for: pay, HR, vacation, expenses tracking?
Or more, how is it possible that obviously unfit and malfunctioning solutions (for problems that have been known, solved and specified for years) are still on the market in 2019 in companies that pretend to be serious about software?
If the answer is: "they definitely do", then you are right. There's no way around it.
If the answer is: "No, they only need to know about 4% of it. The rest can be automated and hidden away." then the problem is that people aren't incentivised to pay the cost of building that software.
There is a broad solution:
Hire engineers, UX designers, and product managers to spend time to solve those problems and to manage that complexity. The problem is that this requires the time and effort of skilled people and that requires a sustained commitment of money. So that requires someone with decision-making power to allocate money from a budget of limited resources.
If the additional UI improvement helps win sufficient revenue, then its worth it. But if the additional UI improvement doesn't persuade decision-makers or only helps 1 client account, then it is not.
Payroll might seem simple but in reality it's full of complex edge cases. For example, employers sometimes receive court orders requiring them to periodically seize a certain amount from a particular employee's pay in order to satisfy a legal judgment. And in some cases there can actually be multiple such orders that would effectively reduce the employee's take home pay below zero. Now what do you do? Please explain how engineers, UX designers, and product managers can "manage" such complexity.
oh I would definitely have assumed so. My question is to what degree does the UI need to lay all that complexity right out for the user and to what degree can it hide it?
If humans inherently need to learn about all that complexity, then the best you can do is make it not-needlessly complicated.
> Please explain how engineers, UX designers, and product managers can "manage" such complexity.
I can't do so in the space of this text box. The answer is practically the field of software engineering.
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I'm curious what your thoughts are on https://docs.gusto.com/ Is it another "yea, this covers 95% of my use cases, but I need that last 5%" Or is it good?
The problem here is putting the cart before the horse and expecting the software to implement policies for you. If you can't design a workflow to work and be compliant without new software, you probably do not know enough about your own workflow to purchase software that will actually improve it.
Rather, they are stuck with it. And deal with it, limiting the contact surface, until they cannot bear it anymore, and spend more to upgrade/get some consulting to have the solution reorganized for them.
On one hand, you have purchase departments that are not the target users, and decide only based on paper reports, what to purchase. Losing the run from the start line. That's a given.
On the other hand, you have those who prefer to outsource the understanding of their own workflow/tooling/business, that could leave them somehow unique and different, to some outside flexible product that claims to solve that (and that meets this and this requirement from that body & that set of laws), but still requires armies of consultants to make it work properly, although it does not cover really your use case, so you better adapt your way of work to what "they" say is good (got Agile anyone?).
Why? Because regulations. Because market/business standards. Financial due diligences.
And why would they not prefer that? They (anyone, we) do not care. We are not paid to care for that. Or rather, we get rapidly burnt for caring.
That's like the entropy law for software & processes in enterprise in general.
Oracle, for instance (but that's valid for so many, if not all, enterprise-targeted solutions), didn't sell itself based on technical merits, you know.
Business are complicated, yes. And they get even more complicated because of people lacking of the courage to say fuck you to the salesman.