Every time I dig into accounting and try to learn it more in depth, it seems that the foundation is trivial. And it coasts on a few "clever" implications from the double book assertion (income/expense accounts), almost in spite of how they don't make sense. You can't classify an item as multiple expense categories without growing the semantic model, so why do you even need the concept of an expense "account" in the first place, as opposed to a single entry in your cash account, tagged with categories?
Meanwhile the bulk of the real complexity revolves around tax rules, which always seem to get left out of "accounting" proper, even though they're the overwhelming reason people to go accountants. I actually installed QuickBooks the other week to see what the gold standard looked like, and it ultimately just seemed to be another way to keep basic credit/debit accounts, with little in the way of preparing/optimizing taxes. Its main value add seemed to be in generating paperwork (eg invoices), that while perhaps nice to formalize, would just increase my scope rather than solve my problems. I expected that it would have automatically prodded me into creating a depreciation schedule and things like that, but it appeared I had to set things like that up manually in terms of basic accounts?
I'm asking because I see people talk about accounting as if they're getting a lot of value out of it. But every time I've dug into it thinking there must be something I'm missing, I've never ended up seeing that value.