Fair enough, the issues for me are that: once something works in a spreadsheet there are no money assigned and willpower to redo it clean in something else, because most of the value is already there; and the people who are available and know the requirements aren’t skilled in anything else.

So prototypes are done in Excel because it’s the fastest and cheapest way to do it, and they don’t get redone in something else afterwards for the reasons above.

> done in excel by one person in a week

Done by a domain expert in their field. If you had to create the project from scratch without aid of an existing Excel file to clone, you would not be able to do it even remotely as quickly as the domain expert, if at all.