Python

So, assuming you're still on Office 2010, you're missing (off the top of my head, but I believe these were all Excel 2013 or later):

• Initial support for super-large spreadsheets, with accompanying perf improvements (this was maybe 2013?), and then lots more perf improvements in 2016 and 2019 as people started using those really big sheets;
• Flash Fill support, which is kind of like an AI (not in the ChatGPT-sense)-powered fill down (so e.g., nowadays, if I enter "Sept 6th" and then "October 4th", then it'll offer a completion of November 1, since that's the first Wednesday of the month);
• Heavily improved Pivot Tables, including Slicers, Power Pivot, and Pivot Drill Down, which make exploring data a lot easier;
• Forecasting tools; and
• Much better Tables, making it a lot easier to write formulae entirely with named references rather than cell IDs There's more, but that's what I could remember off the top of my head/could quickly verify so I was sure I wasn't misspeaking. LibreOffice Calc unfortunately also lacks basically all of these features (and the lack of Tables in particular means that OpenOffice sheets still have a lot of A2:A300 garbage where Excel would instead just have e.g. SomeTable[Heading]. E.g., an actual formula from a sheet I currently maintain to track my team's sprints: =XLOOKUP([@Verified],SprintMeta[Start],SprintMeta[Sprint Name],"Unknown",-1). Python's easier to read here, but this is honestly doing a lot while being surprisingly readable (especially if you're familiar with XLOOKUP, which is basically how you do keyed array access in Excel)

You have totally legitimate gripes about Excel; I'm not denying that. But I do think that you might be pleasantly surprised on newer versions.