Hi Kevin
I’ve been working with CiviCRM for about 15 years now, and have found that whilst it has its idiosyncracies and its bugs like any tool, I’ve been able to use it successfully in many different scenarios with a diverse range of organisations and requirements, including cooperatives and including a number of pretty straight-ahead business outfits. It has some real strengths, especially in terms of the core contact management, membership management, event management and case management areas, and in recent years has a very rapidly growing ecosystem of extensions (plugins) that extend and change core behaviours.
In terms of UX there is a new Bootstrap-based interface available that makes a massive difference and a set of UI-based tools now either available or coming on stream very soon that give you a lot of control over display options.
For developers there is a robust and comprehensive API.
CiviCRM is designed primarily with the needs of third sector organisations in mind, so the language and tools are not particularly geared for things like sales pipelines, where commercially oriented CRM tools - and something like EspoCRM is a classic case in point - very often have this as their central organising principle.
So it very much depends on what you need to achieve and the motivations driving your requirements. If you think it might be a fit for your organisation please contact me directly and I’ll be happy to have a more detailed discussion about your requirements and whether Civi might work for you, or not.