- authentication was already taken care of

- adding a field at a particular place was one step (rather than updating a model, updating a view and running a database migration)

- I could make small changes in production (ok, maybe that's not so good!!)

- adding events between different Lotus Notes apps on the same server was a snap

- the learning curve to become productive was just a few days

Of course, I'm not saying every type of app fits this model. Or even that every app that fits this model can be strung together with Lotus Notes functions and without using 'proper' code (Lotus Notes had its own variant of Visual Basic).

But for many use cases, you could do a lot in a very short time without very few lines of code.