SQL gives the developer an option to build a front end of some sort, though, which might be able to get the ease of use to a similar level to that of Excel.
Based on the description of how it works, all of the business logic is baked right into the database. With this design, it should be straight forward to build a front end in something like Flask or Rails since all of the hard business logic is already done. And this would not break his current emacs workflow at all.
