I was building awesome things with Access 20 years ago. I loved that thing. I wasn't even a software engineer. I was in the EE, but I needed a way to track process and it definitely outperformed. And the best thing, it didn't cost us anything. Everybody already had access, lol. I had 40 people use it in production, manufacturing cutting edge stuff. Definitely beat spreadsheets because Access gave you gui for operators.