It might be better now, but from my limited experience it seemed like Salesforce had a "native" way of customizing, a "shorthand" way for customizing and a "salesforce new" way of doing things. And the methods of customizing didnt really do well together, so for doing some automation the "native" way was recommended, but then when you wanted to update the UI to reflect that in the new way, it didnt work with the native solutions making it a whole ridiculous mess to work with over time. Very hard to keep track of what custom code was active and did what. On top of that a lot of the functionality doesnt/didnt work with their new UI so you had to switch between new and old all the time depending on what you were doing. The biggest issue is that Salesforce "can" do everything, so you often try to cram to much functionality requests into salesforce, bloating it yourself and making each new thing you add increasingly difficult to maintain. We were a small business with 15 users ,and I estimate I used close to 1000 hours customizing and setting it up, and in the end of the day we just couldnt get it like we wanted. Took ages before they supported descent email integration, sales funnels were a mess most of the time and only worked on certain objects etc. If we hired a good developer I think he would be able to set up a custom crm with our spesific demands in the same time we fiddled with salesforce. The cost to hire Salesforce Professionals to set up and customize it to your needs is astronomical, I guess for companies with 100 or less users its not worth it with salesforce unless the out of box product fits perfect (which it doesnt).