Being an Oracle consultant by trade I'm probably biased, but I've always enjoyed the simplicity of Apex from a developer's perspective. Simple CRUD forms can be built and published in minutes that are both functional and beautiful. The language stack is SQL/PLSQL/HTML/CSS/JS, and most all of the Javascript you'd ever need to write for field validations, etc. is built for you. I think folks tend to ignore it because it's not open source, but as a tool it's underrated. Not the most performant solution out there, granted, but suitable for most cases. If your backend database is Oracle, it should absolutely be in consideration.