In principle I agree strongly with this approach, especially when an extant "working" solution already exists. However, some of the cargo-cultery that goes on a

In principle I agree strongly with this approach, especially when an extant "working" solution already exists. However, some of the cargo-cultery that goes on almost defies belief. I once heard of a company that created a database table with columns "workbook","sheet name","row","col","value" that they would extract all of their spreadsheets into as a "Database backend" for their spreadsheets.