By its nature software designers have to make some decisions on what should be easy, what should be possible and what you'd be better off using some other app for.

If you're on something as radical as not using source code to describe a program (what are you using then? A DB of some sort?), I don't think either emacs or vscode can be your tool of choice.

We know there's no free lunch, if an extensible development environment was flexible enough to make this sort of thing easier, something else had to be made harder.