Oracle (and NetSuite) can charge tens of thousands for software because the software is worth thousands of dollars a month. Financial systems that form the backbone of your company are absolutely the one place you don't want to skimp out on your IT spend.
Spoiler alert: Oracle can be configured to what you need it to do. It can run well, or very poorly, depending on the implementation, and it is extremely powerful from a financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting perspective once you learn the UI. Netsuite (technically now part of Oracle) is almost as powerful but much easier to use from an end-user perspective.
Also: I'm talking about Oracle the enterprise financial management system. I don't know how the database systems get licensed. But I do think it's funny that most complaints from techies about Oracle are really related to the difficulty of learning Oracle's UI or licensing, when most websites, platforms, APIs, etc. these days have worse UI and licensing that's just as bad as Oracle's.
