> I would imagine most people that only know VBA would have no interest in using C# to write office interop code, and I don't blame them.

I'd be happy to use C# but it's so god damn hard to learn those libraries.

The biggest disadvantage in using VBA is speed – not to mention the idiosyncrasies of the language itself, which can make complex code rather painful.

Writing a .xlam addin is easy, except there's no tooling for creating "builds".

On a separate but related note, since writing XML for the ribbon by hand is so annoying (and you also have to write callback wrappers for each Sub you want to expose) I have actually written a python tool that parses annotations from comments in .bas files in a given folder and spits out a .xlam file. Haven't gotten around to publishing it but if folks are interested I can give it a little oomph and finish in the next few weeks, so lmk