You'd be surprised how much effort can be saved by not relying on human interaction to be reliable.

Though convincing people to switch to a new app for that reason, even if it were free and Free, would still be an uphill struggle.

> just formatting your cells as text before entering the values

It is a little more than that. I work with finance people, and there a lot of data is manipulated in Excel but passed around as CSV files for compatibility elsewhere. This causes no end of problems because fixes by setting cell properties are obviously lost in transcription, and date errors creep in as things are moved back & forth between people in the US and those in locales that do dates properly.