Absolutely agree with you. Database-to-spreadsheet is the best way to analyze data then summarize the results in a business setting. Unfortunately, the people seeing the results occasionally want to see how you got to your numbers, and since they frequently have non-technical backgrounds the database step is often where they can no longer follow.

I worked at a company where our data was in SQL Server but we basically had to import the entire data set into Excel because none of the higher-ups knew SQL and wouldn't be able to peer review. Those spreadsheets were slooooooow.