[yagurastation]

Ex-user myself, and although I can empathise with your disappointment, I frankly have to disagree with your small business owner parable.

It was never easy as advertised. Novices even had trouble following the tutorials and making significant modifications to them. Basic tasks, as those mentioned, were easier accomplished with Google Sheets. And if they needed more they'd get someone professional to do Apps Script. Hence how I know of their pains.

[spankalee]

I personally saw many Filemaker users build pretty impressive apps. App Maker was trying to be more powerful and more general, and so we opened up scripting a lot more than what you saw in Filemaker or MS Access, but it never achieved the full original vision or ease-of-use there. Scripting was a giant escape hatch for features that should have been built-into core, and the scripting features themselves didn't evolve enough. Managing scripts and using dependencies were extremely rudimentary.