[isoprophlex]

Not having done much in terms of GIS work, I never had to deal with ESRI until last week.

I was on a call to ask some ESRI rep to add some labeled points to my client's existing map tool. It was a somewhat surreal, weird experience where I got the feeling they were making the work seem much more difficult than it was. Their estimate turned out to insanely off the (my) mark, at eye-watering hourly rates.

At first I thought they had enough business and didn't really care about us. But reading this thread, it seems I was wrong. They are the Oracle of the GIS industry.

[dagw]

In their (possible) defence, stepping outside the the narrow ESRI path of the way you're supposed to do things makes your life a massive pain. I used to work for a company that (among other things) developed tools for clients on top of ArcGIS Online. And I've had many calls where a client asks for a small and very reasonable change, and I embarrassingly have to explain that that is not the 'approved' way doing things in ArcGIS Online, so trying to make that change will essentially require us to rewrite a whole lot of components more or less from scratch and might no even be possible.

I've spent a large number of hours trying to fight ESRI software, lost more fights than I've won and even my victories have mostly been pyrrhic.

[isoprophlex]

Thanks for the perspective, I'm entirely new to the space. We're supposed to use ArcGIS. So if this turns out to be the least painful path, I'll have to learn to deal with it...

[dagw]

ArcGIS the desktop tool, or ArcGIS Online? The desktop tool at least has a pretty complete (but pretty annoying) python API so that if/when you have to, you can circumvent the GUI and automate almost everything. ArcGIS Online is unfortunately extremely inflexible, and things that should be easy are often impossible.

[rat9988]

Adding labels to a map in a readable fashion is not an easy thing. ArcGis solutions, last time I tried, were way better in this space than QGis.