This is easy enough to do with GA if you use custom events. You don't even really need to set up much on the server side; if you fire the events at GA it will understand them. I think the real problem is expectations: Google is just doing statistics on big numbers, and for statistics to tell you anything, you have to have enough observations.
The real problem is that you need a critical mass of customers -- millions of uniques per month -- before this type of workflow tells you anything meaningful. And even then, diminishing returns set in pretty quickly: 80% of your legitimate users probably fit into 3 or 4 usage profiles that will stand out, so to identify the 'long tail' traits and market to them individually requires exponentially more users.
Basically, the type of deep analytics and tracking Google and others promote are only available to customers with enough data to tease them out. This generally is enough to exclude small businesses. You can get some basic stats about your users, but probably nothing you didn't know already. It can help you highlight glaring problems in your workflow (like a broken checkout page) but it's not going to give you magic insight.
Nobody makes it super easy because it's just a hard problem :)
Scale is a function of what you track, though. Taking e-commerce as an example: most people will track conversion rate (product purchases / product page views); most also track cart add rate, checkout rate, etc. But much fewer will track product impressions - that is, the event where a search returns the product in its results, or a category displays it in its catalog, and the user "eyeballs" it.
You get, rule of thumb, perhaps 1 conversion for 10 views; you also get 1 view for 10 impressions. So, tracking impressions (and therefore click-through-rate) decuples the amount of data you're tracking, and allows you to draw conclusions much faster than by waiting for the (admittedly, stronger) signal of conversion rate to tell you what you want to know about your product.
The real problems with Google are the ridiculous fees (150k USD/year for Premium? and I don't even get to talk to an actual Google employee if I have issues, have to go through reseller?) and the fact that there is a lot of "secret sauce" that you do not see and that isn't, or is sparsely documented (compare Google's last click attribution to what you're actually seeing appear on your raw data as the last click, for a simple example). Google wants you to use their superior insights; whether or not they are superior, I prefer having access to the full picture and draw my own conclusions.
I can't speak for the parent post, but my problem with GA is that the mechanics of setting up new events and flows and tests and then mining that data is such a chore. Generating enough data for statistical significance is, of course, a problem for all solutions.
The real problem is that you need a critical mass of customers -- millions of uniques per month -- before this type of workflow tells you anything meaningful. And even then, diminishing returns set in pretty quickly: 80% of your legitimate users probably fit into 3 or 4 usage profiles that will stand out, so to identify the 'long tail' traits and market to them individually requires exponentially more users.
Basically, the type of deep analytics and tracking Google and others promote are only available to customers with enough data to tease them out. This generally is enough to exclude small businesses. You can get some basic stats about your users, but probably nothing you didn't know already. It can help you highlight glaring problems in your workflow (like a broken checkout page) but it's not going to give you magic insight.
Nobody makes it super easy because it's just a hard problem :)