It's not that incentives aren't aligned for people to start using better tools, it's that Excel is largely good enough. So we all deal with stupid Excel hashing

It's not that incentives aren't aligned for people to start using better tools, it's that Excel is largely good enough. So we all deal with stupid Excel hashing of specific genes (because we all know which genes are this issue by this point). This isn't exactly a new phenomenon. When I was in grad school (early 2000s), using Excel for gene names was already a well known issue. Some researchers are never going to use anything other than Excel for this even when people like me harp on them to stop treating Excel as a database. It's "good-enough", so it gets used more often than it should.