> a lot of core sheets I see in businesses need more structure round them

We had this decades ago, it was called dBase, but FoxPro (pre-Microsoft) was great too. Visual For Pro or MS Access were a brutal downgrade of every good aspect of it.

Imagine if today some startup offered a full-stack(TM) platform that included IDE, a language with SQL-like features, visual UI designer, database; generated small standalone binarires, was performant, and was smaller than most web homepages.

There are modern options, like Servoy or Lianja, but they're too "cloudy" to be considered equivalents.

Edit: seems like there's OpenXava too, but that is Java-based, too hardcore for non-professional programmers IMO. The beauty of xBase was that even a highschooler could whip out a decent business application if the requirements were modest.