The science community decided it was far easier to change the names of entire genes than to teach people how to use Excel and never use the "General" format.

I definitely appreciate both sides of the frustration: "General" exists for a lot of good reasons that people are lazy and don't want to learn how to operate the software they use every day correctly, they just want it to read their minds.

For similar, but different reasons, because it is hard to train people everyone else builds elaborate work arounds (renaming genes, coming up with silly naming conventions and separators that won't be confused with dates or numbers, always passing spreadsheets over to "that IT guy who knows how to fix it/clean it up" before doing anything critical with them, etc). It's funny how many of those workarounds become so much more work (as they get concretized into bureaucratic processes) overall than learning to hit the one big Number Format dropdown at the top of the screen sometimes.

Both problems exist because people are inherently lazy and don't want to learn how to use their tools properly, and no one is really at fault on either side ("General" has a right to exist and has existed since Visicalc; People are free to live/die by the illusion that processes are cheaper than education), but a lot of us get stuck uncomfortably in the middle both knowing the tools and being unable to get people to use them right.

> Both problems exist because people are inherently lazy and don't want to learn how to use their tools properly

No. That's definitely not it. We deal with people who know excel inside and out. They are human. They might not notice a cell on row 11593 has an issue. They might forget. It's Excel's fault for not understanding that it is software for humans.