Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good points, and my thoughts exactly when I left university with a business degree. My take now: The workflows of large enterprises are not really well understood at all. With lean management and how management careers work, even the lowest management levels has only a vague idea what is actually happening in their departments. Designing even a tiny system for a small number of users requires a lot of time and a lot…
I'm not sure if you are assuming that I'm a naive guy who is fresh out of university or not. In case you are, I am not. I worked for a small company (I was the 6th employee, and it grew to 150 people) whose largest project was an ERP implementation for an extremely large enterprise which I shall not name, but you would immediately know them. I was not involved on the project directly, but was frequently pulled in to…
I am sure that you must recognize, that when people complain about ERP implementations not fitting, they refer to implementations that you describe as "model"?
I come from the other end of the spectrum, making my first steps building business-process relevant tools while employed in various functions. What really shaped me was having carefully discussed the requirements, building it as specified, then being called because "it is not working", and realizing then and there what the actual business logic was, and how deep it was buried and how dysfunctional it all would have been had I insisted that I had implemented as specified.
I'd say (to the consultant profession in general), grab the proverbial pistol and flashlight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_rat), and go down the rabbit hole, because that's the only way the job can be done right.