The problem with using a tool with say 5% of the features excel provides is you sooner or later run into some feature you need, but is absent in the niche tool. You can't exactly split your work between two tools now. So it just makes sense to use the tool with the super set of all the features, even if you don't use all those features all the time.

The right comparison for this would be using some thing like awk/sed compared to using Perl.