The barriers to moving beyond Excel can be overcome, but it will take some serious effort on many fronts. Both Excel and SQL embody genius concepts, but are such poor implementations that it is easy to conflate the cruft with the advantages.
Regarding your "stockholm syndrome" comment above: Someone in his car hears a PSA about "some guy wrong-way driving" on the very road he is on and thinks "one? hundreds!". Unless you can beef up your argumentation you are that guy.
That's fallacious too. I can be right, even if my argument is incorrect or unconvincing.
Warren Buffet and Nate Silver are both driving against traffic and both of them are righter than everyone else combined.
> SQL [...] cannot be compared to Excel
What Excel and SQL have in common is that they're both a first attempt at a solution to (different) problems, and they've been too successful to properly iterate on. That's why everyone uses some proprietary extensions to SQL and everyone extends Excel with VB or C#.
For clarification, is the GP referring to Microsoft SQL Server when then they say 'SQL' or do they actually mean SQL?
Microsoft's product naming convention is confusing IMHO.