Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness, the rate of change of any type of tool slows down over time as the problem domain becomes well understood. It's like the Joel on Software article (which annoyingly I can't find at the moment) about how software is always pretty much done by about version 4. His example was office software, especially Excel, and sure enough if you loaded Excel 4 today you'd see it does fundamentally all the main things. I…
Excel has recently introduced 4-5 VERY big changes: * javascript (arguably 'nobody' knows how to use it though, looking at the scarce resources) * Lambdas * Sharepoint integration, which is a type of shared notebook - and arguably this has ruined excel usability completely, since linking one file to another is basically unusable, what means were are back to the stone age, where people fucking copy paste things betwee…
Every user could just have their own file, in which they could stash records(Or updates to other people's records), and you could have interfaces to view the data that look like a typical spreadsheet.
The data itself could live in an unsorted set of JSON objects with UUIDs, but the UI could be just as easy as Excel, you'd get tables that you could add or remove columns to and from, and put formulas in the fields, and query in some stripped down language with similar power to Excel.
And it could be 100% compatible, you would be free to put your data in the spreadsheet like the old fashioned way, sync with any cloud including SyncThing and no cloud at all, and data files could just be plain CSV you could version.