Oh yeah, I'm totally aware. My day job is designing and building software to construct/maintain exactly those pipelines.

What I'm saying (which is not news to you) is that clearly Excel is excelling along some dimension that people really care about. Even if it is lacking along other dimensions, the goal ought to be figuring out what makes Excel so good, then figuring out how to reconcile that with the needs of e.g. a high scale genomics pipeline.

But to make even an inch of progress against that, we need to get rid of this "haha Excel is for plebes" attitude that many in the software community adopt.