This is my experience as well. At the end of the day, most line of business applications can just use SQLite and be done with it. One project, one executable, one database, one model, one machine. Very rarely does the business actually need the kinds of fantastical things that are routinely bandied about on hackernews. Now, that isnt to say these things arent fuckin awesome and that we should stop talking about them, we just need to be realistic about the scope and applicability of our tools.

In terms of a universal API, we are kind of doing this in our shop. We are building 1 unified domain model, which is approximately in 3rd normal form. All of our software is required to use this model to represent the facts/state of whatever is happening. Changes to this model go through a semi-formal review process, just like you would expect with an old school SQL setup in a big shop. Our model can be mapped one-way to SQL for purposes of online business rule evaluation or offline reporting.

The benefits of having 1 standardized model are really cool after its been in place for a while. You will notice your non-technical project managers developing an awareness for which top-level types may be implicated in certain matters. Having one slow-changing way to represent the business at hand makes it really easy for people to start picking things up. When its scattered to 50 repositories and 10 different languages, this is a bit trickier.