A big one spent 2 year/man work rewriting all SSIS in Talend, for a bad result, so yes, right, it is always easy to begin a project with SSIS or Talend, then when you need to modify your datasource structures, or add something, those solutions begin to fall
Lately, another one took 2 experts for building a Talend pro solution, and still, it doesn't work
I see. I worked a lot of with DB and with apps to transfer data from between DB. I developed for a company which I worked for, a couple of utilities in C++ to transfer data from ODBC to ODBC datasource. To avoid need to write code for each new ETL process in C++, these utilities interpreted simple declarative script in text file:
Something like this:
data source from 1, data source to 1, SQL statement to select data 1, SQL statement to insert/delete/update data 1
data source from 2, data source to 2, SQL statement to select data 2, SQL statement to insert/delete/update data 2
...
data source from 3, data source to 3, SQL statement to select data 3, SQL statement to insert/delete/update data 3
There were haundreds of batches to transfer data.
Then ETL was moved to IBM Data Stage.
I thought to rewrite such an utility with B4J and JDBC sources, but writing code in B4J is rather simple and flexible.
Now I prefer to write code in B4J instead of using declarative script as I described above.
I personally don't like GUI designer to generate code. From my point of view it's harder to support such a solution and experience of your customers confirms it.
It's only my own opinion
.