The 4GL dream hinges on figuring out how to transition from #2 -> #1 seamlessly. The spectrum is wider and more complex than "Excel -> Postgres" but even solving that journey would be a good start. It could save us all from a whole a bunch of ~needless engineering work.

> it seems very possible to go from #1 -> #2 mechanically, and hand that off to the users who want to play with it

NocoDB seems like a reasonable attempt of taking this approach for Postgres.