VBA isn't really going to be any easier unless you already have visual basic experience in some capacity.

If you use a "proper" database you're also going to get advantages in robustness and ability to easily deploy over a network. My last memories of using access for anything (admittedly about 10 years ago) was that it was prone to performance issues and data loss.

In the end Excel -> Access is a short-term cheap, long-term very expensive decision. It means you invest a lot of money and effort in a tool that can't do databases properly and can't do forms properly and when you want to move to something that can do either properly you have to do both completely over again without any reusable code as no-one uses anything vaguely resembling VBA any more and Access as a DB that positively encourages the inexperienced to do a lot of things wrong.

I am sometimes perplexed why MS hasn't released VBA# yet. It's like there's some petty war that has been going on for the last 7 or 8 years between the office team and the .Net language team.