I agree. I worked as an analyst where due to security policies we only had VBA. There was application which consisted of an Access DB for a "front end" (containing an interface to input data, generate reports in ppt/excel, etc) which connected to another access database as the "back end" and an admin console to pull in data from a SQL database. I had a lot of fun maintaining it.
Yeah I know MS Access & Co. have kind of a bad rap, but if I look at what we were able to actually achieve for the business/users with those tools, it’s really painful to see how little progress we have made in the last 20 years or so.
Someone works on an Excel file every day and reads an article about how they can make their job easier with automation. The language and IDE are built in so it's easy to get started. It's also easy to distribute since anyone with Office can run it.
15 years ago some interns where I now work created a spreadsheet and named it an acronym of their first names. That project has since developed into a fairly important system with a front end and database. They kept the name the same, of course.
