Part of the problem is that, IMAO, Customer Relationship Management is something of an iffy concept to begin with; it always truck me as automating the wrong aspects of customer relationships, taking consideration out of things that should require thought and panning while leaving things that could easily be automated to be done manually. However, this is a vague sense of things rather than any hard facts, so it is likely that my impression here is just wrong, or at least biased.
Another part is that CRMs, likes spreadsheets, tend to get used for everything except those things they are designed for (when was the last time you saw anyone use Excel to do a conditional projection? I'm guessing never). The whole reason that my previous company threw out thousands of lines of working Java code in favor of a half-baked, unworkable approach using SFDC was simply because Salesforce had a vaguely Java-esque programming language built into it, therefor it has to be a general-purpose development platform, right? It must have looked like a way to save time and money, and I have no doubt the SFDC con-artistssultants spun it that way, but since we weren't actually using SFDC as a CRM, we ended up being given a jackhammer to use for both sawing lumber and fitting pipes.