Notion is a surface. Not a design.
Notion does one thing extraordinarily well: it gives you a blank page that bends into any shape you need. That is its gift and its trap.
The gift: nothing is in your way. The trap: nothing is in your way. So the team builds. A CRM here. An onboarding doc there. A project tracker that grew out of a retro. By month eighteen, you have a workspace that looks like organization and feels like archaeology.
The problem isn't Notion. Notion is doing exactly what you asked it to do. The problem is that no one designed the business that Notion was supposed to hold. The database schema is downstream of the operational model, and the operational model is missing.
Symptom 01
Three places to look up a customer. None of them agree.
Symptom 02
Templates for everything. A system for nothing.
Symptom 03
The onboarding doc is 47 screens long and your team still DMs you with the same four questions.
Symptom 04
You can filter every view by every property, and still can't answer "who's stuck at activation?"