To a certain extent, that was certainly the idea, the main difference would be that once a flow is started it is not editable. It has to be returned or recalled to be changed, and then the audit trail starts over again.

That's also a valid criticism. Especially if you're expecting a lot of automated processes to be kicked off once an appropriate approval chain exists. This really is only well suited to businesses where there are limited opportunities for automation. In this particular case, once they recognized that all of the terminal business process steps are mostly manual anyways, they understood the utility of something so simple.. and cheap.