Well, you might accept that I'm "idealizing" Access because, you know, I had a decent experience with it 20 years ago, as described in my first comment. No need to go searching for mysterious ulterior motives when they're explained in the post!

For what it's worth, I do remember significant flaws in Access. For one thing, it was an absolute pain when we wanted to modify the database - we had to get everyone to log off, and then upgrade all of the clients at once. This is one of those problems that the web solves elegantly. Also, Access had major issues with concurrent users. Performance fell off a cliff, and from memory, certain operations were unsafe (I think you could set up a SQLServer which would address the concurrency problems, but we never bothered).

But these days we have better options available to us - app stores fix the updating problem, without introducing the css + html + javascript mess. We have decent, free web servers, and web application frameworks such as Django and Rails that make writing the server side code that drives the RESTful APIs used by the client relatively easy. But what we don't have is:

a) an easy way to create a server (this needs to be as easy as sharing an Excel spreadsheet) b) a coherent development environment from client to server code. Something that allowed you to write apps purely in Javascript (no css or html) with a GUI editor, and which also let you write the server code in node.js would be a close match to what I'm thinking of. Bonus points if most of the node.js code is derived from the client-side code, so that the novice programmer doesn't need to be aware that a server even exists, it just works.

The problem is, that's the kind of application that's really hard to write. It's big, an IDE in fact, and really Microsoft is the only game in town for making that sort of stuff. But they won't write Android / iOS / Mac clients, so it doesn't happen.

At our company, we have an Access "thing" (it's not even an application, really) for generating listings of the phone numbers and birthdays of all the employees.

Recently, for no apparent reason, it stopped working. I consider myself moderately competent at getting up to speed with new development tools and reading myself into other people's code if I have to, but Access somehow is completely incomprehensible to me.

Maybe I was just missing something fundamental, but I found Access hugely frustrating and not intuitive at all. The general idea behind it seems actually kind of good, but the Microsoft chose to implement it is not exactly optimal. Also, as usual for MS, the complete lack of a manual made me want to strangle somebody. So, yeah, I totally agree with your statement. :)