You seem to be moving in the direction of ad hominem attacks, which will bring the conversation to a shrieking halt, if you continue.
Among other things, you seem to have forgotten that I agree with you that, as a general rule, deciding what you need and seeing who has it, without regard to technology, is the best strategy. I've run into enough places that had decided on Oracle, even though I had a better solution to have good personal reasons for that, but I also have a number of years in which I was doing vendor-independent computer systems acquisition consulting before I found that I could actually provide a better service for my customers by taking ownership of the package ... they were the ones who talked me into it.
Not all experience shows in the resume, of course. Nor is being a worker bee doing an implementation the only way to gain experience and knowledge.
And, no, that customer didn't kick themselves ... in fact, they were extremely happy to have saved a couple of million dollars in customization that would have been required to merely equal the capabilities of my software had they switched. Happy enough to run around publishing conventions bragging about having the best royalty contracts package that anyone had ever seen. They would be busy working together with me today had they not been acquired by Wiley.
And no, Siebel was not a career move. What I am doing these days is helping companies with legacy ABL applications to modernize, pioneering the automated generation of UML from ABL code. I will be speaking about this at the next Exchange, if you would like to learn about it.
While I agree with the general principle, all I am trying to do is to balance your extreme "you must do it my way or you're an idiot" position with the recognition that a shop which has an established investment and expertise in Progress applications and which may, in fact, have some important business "mini-apps" in ABL that they would like to keep, is not being totally unreasonable about preferring a Progress application.
If they are starting out a a COBOL shop, desperately needing to modernize, then certainly they should be looking at a variety of technologies and packages to see who has the best fit. But, even then, it shouldn't be merely a question of best fit out of the box because they should also be considering the cost to move the application from what comes out of the box to a more acceptable level of fit and the cost over multiple years of evolution of the software to changing business conditions. This is what sold that customer back in 1990, BTW ... it was having a prior vendor where the cost of mods was so high that they just couldn't afford to do most of them. With me, they could do mods all day long because there was a clear ROI in relationship to the modest expense. As a consequence, we took them from a $5M company to a $50M company without adding a single person in the office operations staff. Now, that's ROI.