As someone who's taken a couple semesters of college-level accounting, and filed my corporate taxes correctly many years without audit (but am not an accountant/CPA), this seems broadly correct.

I'm actually surprised people are freaking out about this. Of course software is R&D. And of course you don't just get to expense it all at once. It's long-lived, like you said.

Maybe we could have some tax breaks like our friends over in real estate, but I very much think the base assumption should be that software dev is capitalized.