Yes, it has a ton going on but most of companies I've found using it are using primarily as RDBMS and thus MySQL/Postgres could replace it. Other stuff it did could be replaced by tools more geared towards specific function and most of time, at much lower cost.
Licensing isn't cheap. For anyone wondering, before discount, it's 876/yr per core for Standard and 3288/yr per core for Enterprise. Also note that Standard is limited to 24 cores and 128GB of RAM, if you want to unlock more of that, you must move to Enterprise.
My point was just that there’s a lot going on there, and value for those who want more than an RDBMS. I have no disagreement that the RDBMS on its own is not worth paying for for most, and especially not for any techish organizations.
I’d also note that most orgs and use cases probably don’t need more than 24 cores and 128GB RAM.
I think for an organization that wants a near-trivial out of the box experience with RDBMS, reporting, and analytics, Standard Edition is not a bad deal. Especially for the many organizations that are already using Microsoft as their identity provider and productivity suite.
Licensing isn't cheap. For anyone wondering, before discount, it's 876/yr per core for Standard and 3288/yr per core for Enterprise. Also note that Standard is limited to 24 cores and 128GB of RAM, if you want to unlock more of that, you must move to Enterprise.