I worked as a graduate assistant on a project administering a survey on tablets in challenging conditions. Your points are valid, but we found that we could create a streamlined Enketo (https://enketo.org/) form with categorical, quantitative, and Likert scale questions (minimal and optional free text fields) and the enumerator teams were successful. We ended up using Kobo Toolbox, mentioned in another comment, which mates Enketo as a front-end to the ODK set of tools. Running pilot tests and timing the input of each answer of the survey helped to dramatically streamline it, so that seems essential for using digital tools.
Two major perks to using the ODK type tools - many folk have smartphones with browsers on them, so running ODKCollect or especially Enketo is accessible, and the logged data gets pushed up to a server as soon as possible. The latter point was really useful for us - I spun up a quick app in Shiny (https://www.shinyapps.io/) which would give some plots based on the data collected so-far, and after the first day or two the survey administrators found a hiccup in how one of the enumerators was answering a question (they were incorrectly tagging the locations they were visiting, which would have caused havoc to relabel later!) I think that sold a lot of us on the value of these tools.
Totally agree about XForms. Shame it's not more widely used. I did get a lot of mileage out of using XLSForm (http://xlsform.org/) to write the survey first though.
Two major perks to using the ODK type tools - many folk have smartphones with browsers on them, so running ODKCollect or especially Enketo is accessible, and the logged data gets pushed up to a server as soon as possible. The latter point was really useful for us - I spun up a quick app in Shiny (https://www.shinyapps.io/) which would give some plots based on the data collected so-far, and after the first day or two the survey administrators found a hiccup in how one of the enumerators was answering a question (they were incorrectly tagging the locations they were visiting, which would have caused havoc to relabel later!) I think that sold a lot of us on the value of these tools.
Totally agree about XForms. Shame it's not more widely used. I did get a lot of mileage out of using XLSForm (http://xlsform.org/) to write the survey first though.