I'm way more proficient as a programmer, than an Excel user, so it was my assumption that all these marketing guys that constantly work with Excel can do wonder

I'm way more proficient as a programmer, than an Excel user, so it was my assumption that all these marketing guys that constantly work with Excel can do wonders with it. I mean, they probably can, but recently I tried to use it (actually, it was LibreOffice Calc, so there might be my problem, but I don't know if the difference really is this big) instead of writing a python or bash script (as I would usually do) and was unpleasantly surprised by how complicated the stuff that I would consider standard is, like concatenating columns, grouping/counting unique values, dirty data semi-automated cleanup and such. Everything would require either multiple clicks in multiple menus to perform something that appears to be very ill-composable actions in Calc, or would require writing 50-line Basic script (on kinda ugly APIs) for something that I can do by simply converting all of that to csv and writing 5 lines of Python (or sometimes even shell text-utils, literally). My general impression was that it is not really a tool made with power-user efficiency in mind, ending up being not very efficient for anyone, since it isn't very intuitive software to use for an excel-noob anyway. So my question is, is this really the state of art for visual working with data-sheets, semi-manual data editing and such? I was assuming that running a Jupyter/Pluto/RStudio and doing stuff in Python/Julia/R when you don't indent to do actual data-analysis/learning, but only something that seems like basic stuff/preprocessing is more of a bad habit, because Excel was actually made to work with tabular (DataFrame-like) structures, but I ended up feeling like there's no way I would actually prefer Excel for that.