Billy,
It sounds like what you're missing is the value of the Business Transactions, and everything built on top of them!
Business Transactions provide the user friendly name to what's happening in the system. It's the identifier most people would recognize that differentiates "Order" from "Search" or any other transaction in the system.
Although there are a couple of ways to get Business Transactions defined, Agent Recording is best way to get user friendly Business Transaction names if you don't have TIMs in the network.
Business Transactions are one of the cornerstones in the product. For example, they define many of the experiences that we leverage in the Triage Map, Experience View, and Assisted Triage.
Ultimately, it's "Introscope Only" because you're not using the TIMs.
Running without anything CEM or things Postgres related is definitely not the idea or direction for the product. In fact, merging them is when it started to be called APM - about 7 years ago. A lot of the value in the solution over that 7 years, but especially in the past few years, is related to better associating the experience to the infrastructure. Further, this contributes to making it simpler for people who are not experts to use the solution.
Regards,
Tim