What you see as a drawback, I see as the selling point. Sure SAP is always in some sort of development mode, but this adds to the 'robustness' of the tool to meet ongoing business demands. I was an SAP consultant, now I work for a company that wanted to buid a core-competancy within their IS. :)
I worked for IBM when Systems Network Architecture was the jobs creation machine for thousands of Network specialists within the Fortune 1000.