that's a fairly sophisticated solution, but it's just one of many potential approaches to fixing the problem.
MS Excel
MS (names are harder than I thought / remembered) Matrix
In the back-end they'd use the same sanity and share 99% of the code, but Excel would add in the cruft / warts compatibility quirks.
And unfortunately my guess is that most Excel users don't surf HN or other geek sites.
They could easily make it an optional behaviour.
They could have a scripting environment variable that is “quirkkMode=ON” by default and would maintain backwards compatibility at the small expense of needing to specify sane behaviour as an exceptional circumstance: just another line of boilerplate.
There’s a lot of things they could do. They’ve no doubt considered all of them and then some, and yet they‘c’è decided to do almost nothing. I suppose that says something about the disconnect between how we and they perceive their incentives, but I’m not sure what that assertion is.
A million checkboxes in the settings menu later, people will be griping that "Excel is terrible for having all these crazy settings to deal with!"
Of course Microsoft has thought about this, it's silly to think they never have and we're smarter. Yes, this behavior is annoying and US-centric, they know that. But they also know that breaking compatibility with all these scripts and macros would be the worse problem in the larger picture. That picture is huge, it would be on the order of the scope of the Y2K effort to modify every code everywhere that's ever touched Excel dates.
Would you want Excel to introduce a "quirks mode" to handle this sort of thing?