Bureaucratic forms have a tendency to change unpredictably. Today they want weight in kilograms, tomorrow they'll want it in grams, and the day after that in standardized intergalactic weight units. I get what you're saying (and I don't like writing unnecessary mapping boilerplate too), but there should be a middle layer to protect the application from craziness like that.

Thankfully things in our sector is fairly static in that regard, so this is seldom an issue. That sounds quite horrible indeed.

And yes, a fatter middle layer would be nice. Our next generation software will probably have more of that, this code base is over 20 years old at this point...