I and every one of our users also agree!  A simple user preference menu containing the preference of which page to return to when closing a function would do the trick.  

Kevin, are your folks utilizing the Favorites Bar?  Since the cascading menus went away, Sage added the option to the Star menu to "Show Favorites Toolbar".  Once a user adds their top "daily" functions to their favorites, this might alleviate some pain.

Also, when you are in a function Product Maintenance for example, the breadcrumb path "All > Common Data > Products"  are clickable.  If click on Products, it shows you all the functions that are in the Product Menu.  If you click on Common Data, you will see all the submenus under Common Data.  All will let you see all of the function menus you have access to.

Kevin, are your folks utilizing the Favorites Bar?  Since the cascading menus went away, Sage added the option to the Star menu to "Show Favorites Toolbar".  Once a user adds their top "daily" functions to their favorites, this might alleviate some pain.

Also, when you are in a function Product Maintenance for example, the breadcrumb path "All > Common Data > Products"  are clickable.  If click on Products, it shows you all the functions that are in the Product Menu.  If you click on Common Data, you will see all the submenus under Common Data.  All will let you see all of the function menus you have access to.

That's a reasonable alternative.

Thank you for your suggestions.  Yes, all of our users do utilize the bookmark bar.  And yes, it alleviates some of the pain.  However, my goal is to ensure my users experience zero unnecessary pain in the process of carrying out their value-added responsibilities.  Work itself can be painful enough; the tool we invest much into to help us be better at our work should not be painful, even in the slightest sense.  

The bookmark bar in v12 provides two new annoyances not present in v7, version from which we upgraded: 1) when clicking on bookmark drop down list arrow from any page other than homepage, the page jumps to homepage which then requires user to click on drop down list arrow again.  2) drop down list repeats bookmarks that already display in bookmark bar which requires user to scroll past those to get to the one they were originally looking for.  But this is for another thread.

I discourage my users from using the "breadcrumb" menu links due to frequent "cannot call function from this context" error messages, and because it no longer is a true "breadcrumb" trail as it doesn't continue to list all screens/functions the user is nested into.  

Deep understanding of the UX/UI problems, all to SAGE improve..