Uh ... no. Grants rarely ever support SWE outside of a core application. No granting agency would support writing a new open source tool that effectively replicates what is available in market today.

You are right in that genomic scientists chose poorly here. Excel isn't the right tool for the job, but there are very few options that could work, and the others required some assembly ... which they couldn't get money to fund. And the other potential solutions were not ubiquitous.

For them, renaming genes is the easier solution than switching workflows to new (to be assembled) tooling. Remember, scientists are people too ... they will opt to take paths of lower resistance even when they are suboptimal.