The question is not what a sufficiently motivated competent person can do with the tools.
It's what a sufficiently motivated incompetent person can do to your data with the tools.
Infinite flexibility in the tooling means infinite ways to mess the database up in subtle and/or irredeemable ways, and a formula in a cell or even a regular expression are not great ways to tidy up real-world data, you often want autocorrect, autosuggest, defaults and friendly error messages for bad data rather than just ERROR IN CELL G91. When you reach that level of complexity it becomes much harder to build something useful with a spreadsheet-like tool alone.
It is a really interesting idea though and for certain classes of data could really work well.
It's what a sufficiently motivated incompetent person can do to your data with the tools.
Infinite flexibility in the tooling means infinite ways to mess the database up in subtle and/or irredeemable ways, and a formula in a cell or even a regular expression are not great ways to tidy up real-world data, you often want autocorrect, autosuggest, defaults and friendly error messages for bad data rather than just ERROR IN CELL G91. When you reach that level of complexity it becomes much harder to build something useful with a spreadsheet-like tool alone.
It is a really interesting idea though and for certain classes of data could really work well.