I agree that the customer / business focus is often very lacking. Sometimes because engineering is put too much into focus, but very often because of politics. At the same time it's not an easy thing to do. The "business" is usually quite bad at verbalizing their needs and requirements, especially at the level of detail that engineering requires.
Having done at least one migration from "could have literally just been a spreadsheet" applications into proper applications, I'm very careful with recommending spreadsheets. It's great how flexible they are, but that's also their major down side. If you want to enforce anything within a spreadsheet, you have few options and it's very easy for something to break. For example someone deleting a formula, a formula not including the full range, or copy & pasting breaking the references. Not to mention the performance issues you'll run into once you've collected a few rows.
Having done at least one migration from "could have literally just been a spreadsheet" applications into proper applications, I'm very careful with recommending spreadsheets. It's great how flexible they are, but that's also their major down side. If you want to enforce anything within a spreadsheet, you have few options and it's very easy for something to break. For example someone deleting a formula, a formula not including the full range, or copy & pasting breaking the references. Not to mention the performance issues you'll run into once you've collected a few rows.