Difficulty recreating an Excel spreadsheet in a general-purpose programming language isn't evidence of the superiority of spreadsheets, it's just a consequence

Difficulty recreating an Excel spreadsheet in a general-purpose programming language isn't evidence of the superiority of spreadsheets, it's just a consequence of the object/relational impedance mismatch. I strongly suspect that reimplementing OP's spreadsheet in MySQL wouldn't have presented any deep problems.