I have more than once found myself answering that sort of question. I gave similar reasoning. In 2020, for a grassroots PPE-relief organization, however, I fou

I have more than once found myself answering that sort of question. I gave similar reasoning. In 2020, for a grassroots PPE-relief organization, however, I found that I had sometimes been mistaken. What our group managed to achieve by eschewing (eventually as a watchword) fancy tools and building our entire backend around Google Sheets was speed. Moreover, I learned along the way that simple database tools are sometimes more-efficient or faster than anything I'd have written myself. I had been blinded by the GUIs -- the (frequently correct) notion that GUIs are generally inferior in the long run to scripting/programming had blinded me to the very idea that perhaps another tool could be superior. As my career takes me in new directions, I'm presently reprising that experience, this time with SQL. Physicists rarely use it, so we have no idea what it can do. The syntax looks old/quirky/muddy, but the tools behind it are extremely powerful. If you're great at R, consider sitting down with someone whom you know is just crushing problems with Excel. I'm pretty sure you'll both learn something useful.