For me personally, the 'bad accounting' comes into play with contract work. You build some widget for customer, and if it's anything less than work-for-hire (i.e. you give customer a commercial license but retain copyright or some right to reuse your code in the future), that was research and gets amortized. Think like building or just modifying a Bootstrap template -- is that really "research"?

Maybe it's not concrete, but it feels like there's a difference between investing capex into a planned future product, and retaining some rights in the work you create for others.