Ewald Cress describes an Inner Platform Effect issue:
When you spend a reasonable amount of time churning out simple form-based UI workflows, you inevitably get bored. And you try and abstract away the drudgery of building forms into something the Common Folks can manage, by building a framework, because Lord knows you can’t buy this sort of thing off the shelf. Inevitably, the arcane knowledge of how to churn out expensive work without obviously doing expensive work can safely stay within an inner circle of senior developers who will be the only people ever allowed to try and configure a no-programming-needed workflow.
Never mind. Their hearts were in the right place.
Could be worse? Maybe they could have run a WAITFOR for the number of seconds corresponding with the string’s length and then collected that information from a Windows event log entry.