There already is (and has been for some time) a "better Excell" that'a also a "better Ms Access" at the same time: Quantrix (http://www.quantrix.com/), it can replace brittle spreadsheets with much easier to manage documents and do much more

...but there's a problem with it: it's just too much for 99% of people, both as features (It's probably easier to learn a general purpose programming language) and as price :)