But the sell here is that your boss goes to spreadsheet hell and you go to the unemployment line.

This just means your boss needs a spreadsheet model guy. "Bosses" would rather die than enter a formula in spreadsheet.

This may have been true in 1985, but it is definitely not true today. "Bosses" love making massively complex spreadsheets.

Many of them love consuming and faffing about with complex spreadsheets but I just watched my CTO cut & paste cells with menu items and the mouse, in a round-about A->C, B->A, C->B way. And the font is comic sans, and everything is sorted by color. Any of the more sophisticated tools or a macro is way beyond this one.

Given the pervasive nature of spreadsheets in today's world, we have no choice but to embrace it but need to manage spreadsheets based data properly.

The good news is that Mathematics of Big Data book published by MIT press book is proposing associative array algebra that is capable of properly processing spreadsheets, graph networks, matrices and databases [1], [2]. According to the book this is the first time such system is being proposed. They even provided open source D4M software in Python and Matlab to demonstrate the idea, probably worth checking out [3].

[1] Mathematics of Big Data:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038393/mathematics-of-big-da...

[2] Associative Arrays: Unified Mathematics for Spreadsheets, Databases, Matrices, and Graphs:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1501.05709

[3] A D4M module for Python:

https://github.com/Accla/D4M.py