Because faculty didn’t want to do it anymore. They want it handled by others but also they want oversight and veto power but also they don’t want to be bothered. But it better always work, and if they make a mistake the software is broken because don’t tell them it’s a user error they used to write Fortran.
As a faculty member at a large university…I have a deep respect for the impossible job of university IT departments.
We originally rolled our on LMS decades ago. When we switched to canvas we kept the home brew running for five years past its expiration date because faculty refused to remove their files. Finally each one was manually moved by IT for the recalcitrant old faculty.
It is kind of funny when these LMS tools with 100+ functions are being used for little more than what email, a grades spreadsheet, and maybe a shared drive would do. University might even ask for the final grades in spreadsheet format by the end of the term anyhow, so data goes into the LMS just to come back out again.
In a sense you aren’t wrong but those analogies fail at scale. It’s like saying you could replace all hr functions with a spreadsheet.
They are large databases yes but they do a lot of small and large things that that analogy glosses over