More and more we're building workarounds to require associations & labels. The utility of both is hampered by the inability to require their existence on deals (for example, but other types of pipelines we have the same needs such as tickets & some of our custom objects that have pipelines).
Here are two use cases and the messy workarounds:
The ability to require a contact & a company be associated with a deal feels like functionality that is missing and should exist. No CRM customer ever has sold a deal that didn't have a customer or a contact, and no B2B company in history has ever sold without a company and a contact. This is one of those features that has me shaking my head.
The ability to require a custom object association or to require an association label feel less like gaps than temporary gaps since the products themselves are both new, but eventually it will feel like a big gap.
Also, association labels on custom objects would be awfully nice also (for contacts & companies) and at least at our company, every one of our 4 custom objects would benefit from being able to flag associations.
2 cents. Hope y'all implement these 🙂