just because I'm the original "requestor"....
<kidding>
a great time ago, when the world was full of wonders, the examples app was showing the latest and badasses features to "lure" smart developers in the magical world of web2py.
It was readily available on
web2py.com AND was a reference implementation for nearly all the bullets web2py had.
Then, a big group of witches came by and harassed the online app so bad that was a problem to maintain, and so everything that was database related was stripped out.
Several years passed, and the needs of the online app changed to a more pleasing landing page, that was never decoupled from the one shipped with web2py.
In all this time, no recipes were added and no updates were made. Then pythonanywhere came to the rescue with "demo1", "demo2" and "demo3"....
</kidding>
the examples app could be a great deal if it included "modern" patterns (i.e. keep up with the new features) and actually unit-tested, while being decoupled from the "online landing page pattern" that the current one has.
I even proposed such an app but it never started being followed by "the general population".
As it is, it's a - not even complete - dump of the online landing page, and the examples are not so readily available --> it's not really of much use.