Thank you @julian you always respond and seem motivated in helping the community. By proprietary I meant no effort has been made to provide clean working examples for the latest nodebb, as in maintenance of such documentation for people jumping into nodebb to replace their old system.
You have a great product here, with so much more potential and I understand you may not have resources and funding to provide so much documentation and maintain working example of a plugin that does CRUD with custom fields/custom data, but it becomes harder for new adopters if they're unable to figure out cost effective way to replace their old platforms which have plethora of 3rd party add-ons and plugins especially dealing with custom fields and custom data.
I take the blame as well, as part of the community it is partly our job to help keep a set of quickstart plugins, documentation, help available to enhance and optimize the process for new adopters. I hope the community gets together and makes something like a curated directory of available plugins, and tags and tracks what versions each supports, and tries to keep a version that supports the latest major version updates.
Thank you for the wonderful product, I keep trying and finding an excuse to adopt it and hopefully I will get there sooner or later.