I'm in the position of being shallow in the domain I code for--and I find it a very big help. Knowing what the real world implications of what the numbers become is a great help in understanding what truly is being requested. Just ran into that not too long ago--my code suddenly started slamming a side-cutting bit into the wood. Look into it....years ago there was a bug upstream of me that slammed the bit into the wood. Simple fix: spot the offending pattern, replace it with something sane. The upstream bug was "fixed" (not fully), my simple (lack of true knowledge of what was happening) fix proceeded to undo their fix. Then it got rewritten the way it should have been, a more general recognition of unacceptable movements and how to fix them.

>> You need to know your specific company, no way around it

Of course there are ways around it. For example you can build the foundation yourself (which will cover the 80% that is shared across every company in that industry) and give users the ability to build the rest themselves inside the software. This type of abstraction-based architecture is how platforms like Salesforce took off and became ubiquitous.