@Tom

What you are describing are good business practices for a company that wants to screw over the tax payer really well.

They do lease schemes because that way they get more revenue as schools do not replace the kit after 3 years so carry on paying for it even though they have bought it twice over already. If you cancel the lease you don't get to keep the kit even though it is worthless as RM will send a bean counter to make sure the kit is disposed of.

They apply a number of policies to the users and computers (especially the server) in order to stop teachers messing with it and screwing things up and thus they decrease their support costs compared with a system where schools can customise their IT.

They charge through the nose for extra services (revenue streams) because they can and they make it hard to provide the services yourself purely because it cuts down on support costs (where your freeware mail server software has brought down the CC server and you are blaming them).

As for applying policies with only one setting in them, it makes it a lot easier to move policies around and only apply the ones you want rather than applying them in blocks and it saves the numpty teachers from having to go into gpedit.

All of these are sound business practices to screw over the end user who, in the case of schools, you have to assume is a total fuckwit and in general RM will see these things as "saving the user from themself" or "cutting support calls". In the unlikely event that a school employs someone in IT who has some sort of clue (unlikely as schools pay roughly half what a good corporate will pay and if they had a clue they would go get a job in a corporate) then they can ditch RM and do it themselves but as most ICT staff are as computer litterate (or less so) than the children they teach it is best to keep them from breaking the kit that the taxpayers have paid through the nose for.