What kind of application are you developing where there is so little middleware between the database storage layer and the user that converting to/from kilos adds significant additional complexity, but your users aren't technical enough to just deal with having weights in grams?
These are electronic versions of official forms. The user interface and reports should show what is actually being sent or has been sent.
Sure we could deal with it, but there are quite a number of tables due to different forms and messages, and then there's all the reports. Many custom ones thanks to to local officials wanting data from a certain customer in a certain way...
Bureaucratic forms have a tendency to change unpredictably. Today they want weight in kilograms, tomorrow they'll want it in grams, and the day after that in standardized intergalactic weight units. I get what you're saying (and I don't like writing unnecessary mapping boilerplate too), but there should be a middle layer to protect the application from craziness like that.
Thankfully things in our sector is fairly static in that regard, so this is seldom an issue. That sounds quite horrible indeed.
And yes, a fatter middle layer would be nice. Our next generation software will probably have more of that, this code base is over 20 years old at this point...
