[meredydd]

Aside: This is also why the OP's wishes for "a better spreadsheet" so often run into trouble. If you take a spreadsheet and naively "add more power" with a programming language, you're producing an abrupt transition from mode #3 to mode #2. This spooks the user almost as much as learning to code from scratch - and for the same reasons.

I don't have an answer for this. For https://anvil.works we deliberately avoided this pitfall by never pretending to be a spreadsheet (or, for that matter, shrinkwrap, like Salesforce does). We make you write code from step 1, and get comfy with it, because if you started in any other paradigm it would be too hard to switch. And if you don't write code, you'll never get much advantage over just using Access.