It's rather disappointing how the industry hasn't made any progress on CRUD application development productivity in the past 20+ years. Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 allowed low-skilled developers to build working client/server CRUD applications far faster than any modern web development framework. Of course it's easier to distribute web applications than thick client Windows applications, but other than that we haven't gained anything.
We're trying to move this forward at https://anvil.works - the usability of Visual Basic, with the ease of distribution of the web. Biased I may be, but I'd call that progress :)
