> I understand the desire to have non-developers write code for themselves, but the problem is that the quality and reliability of that code can be utterly terrible and they don't have the expertise for the edge cases,
People should write code for themselves, and not all code needs to be good quality or have all edge cases covered. there's nothing wrong with someone making a tool for their job and handling the edge cases as they occur.
Microsoft Access could be a better tool for a lot of those spreadsheets, I might wager! It would teach user interface design, simple relational database concepts, data types (!) and more. I really wish MS hadn't turned this product into a dead end, seems like a lost opportunity to give aspiring devs a path to learning more capable systems.
People should write code for themselves, and not all code needs to be good quality or have all edge cases covered. there's nothing wrong with someone making a tool for their job and handling the edge cases as they occur.