A couple things drive me nuts about how they do licensing now.

First, the list price scares people away while no one actually pays that much. If you are paying that much, call up your sales rep and see what they can do for you.

Second, you can save a TON of money by doing Server + CAL for Standard, but then you own all these licenses that can't be transferred into Enterprise.

Say you have 100 employees / devices, so you buy 100 CALs at list for $200 each. Then you install SQL Standard on 15 servers for $900 each. You paid $33,500, even if you're running 16 cores on each server.

If you would have installed it on those 15 servers with just core licensing of $1,800 with a minimum of 4 cores per server, you would have paid $108,000.

It's hard to argue that you should pay $70,000 more just in case you decided you want Enterprise later, so you're forced to go with Server+CAL. However, none of that price is applicable to the price for Enterprise, so instead of Enterprise at list prices being $5,200 more ($7,000 - $1,800) per core, it's a full $7,000 per core more, and management is leaning even stronger toward a "No". Again, these are non-negotiated prices where you just go to someone's website and buy it.

Third, you're going to use developer edition in non-prods because it's much cheaper, but it has all the enterprise features in it. Some you need to turn on, but others just work. Now you're testing against Enterprise, but you're running Standard in Production. I wish Developer had an option to act like Standard.

I have other complaints, especially in regards to HT on a VM, but I think I've said enough for now.