Are recommendation forms getting too demanding?

It seems to me that B-schools are demanding more from recommenders than ever. I've had to apologize to my recommenders recently, and I can't blame them for their irritation.

What a recommender wants to do is write one great letter for you and then send that out to all your schools. In an evening of writing, they can cover all the things they want to say about you, and address all the issues that schools are interested in. If they have to fill out a little form with percentile checkboxes too, no big deal.

Instead, many schools now have a list of specific questions, each to be addressed individually. Both of my recommenders had already written a nice letter for me, but when they logged in to submit it, they were faced with half a dozen individual textboxes where they were supposed to address specific questions. I got frustrated calls from them, and I had to tell them to just paste their letter into the first box, then note that all the questions were addressed in that entry. Neither recommender wanted to spend the next two hours dissecting their letter and rewriting the paragraphs so each fit one specific question.

I can see how schools would want to have a separate mini-essay to address each quality of an applicant. It would clearly make it easier to read and evaluate the application. But this is at the expense of the recommenders' time and effort. As an applicant, I'll bend over backwards in pretty much any way I can to accommodate the AdCom, but go easy on my recommenders.

Most applicants probably have only a limited amount of good will to burn with their recommenders. These are busy people, and often, they are not excited at the prospect of losing an employee to business school. They are writing for several schools (and possibly several applicants), so there's no time for each school to require them to write separate essays.

I'm sure that the schools must expect that many recommenders will simply submit a single, generic letter, regardless of what they ask for. And it's fine to ask that certain issues are addressed in that letter. But I feel that they've crossed a line when each school designs unique, and long, online forms for recommenders to fill out in place of a letter.