Idea Summary
The Starter apps in APEX are highly usable. However, there is no full-featured CRM Starter app in APEX. There are independent Starter apps like Customers, Opportunities, etc. that are hard to use as we have to switch between each app and they are not integrated.

Use Case
Small projects/indie developers could readily use a CRM Starter app if available in APEX. Commercial CRM apps like Sugar CRM cost a lot in subscriptions. Why should we use a 3rd party, non-APEX, paid CRM app when we could just install and use a free, native, Starter “APEX” app to our heart's content? This is similar to using the built-in Team Development module which integrates well with APEX pages.

Preferred Solution (Optional)
Merge Customers, Opportunities, Team Calendar and other Starter apps by importing their pages into a new, single CRM Starter app and integrate their tables, pages, menus and other components. You could also copy features of some Sample apps to add more muscle to the CRM Starter app. Coming up with this new CRM Starter app would also be a quick project without much development by merging multiple existing apps and their pages/components into a single app with a BIG bang! This new CRM Starter app will go a long way to demonstrate how powerful APEX really is!

If APEX team does the above merger for once (because the team also knows the inner workings of Starter apps), it could be used by many developers worldwide instead of each developer who needs it having to do that redundantly and inconsistently.

PS: The Opportunities app has some minor glitches on Leads and Contacts pages and spits out tag text instead of rendering HTML because their Escape Special Characters is is turned ON (it is rendering as HTML below :) -

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