I understand your concerns completely, but not everybody is spreadsheet savvy. I’m a programmer by day, so a lot of this logic stuff comes easy to me, but for others, it’s beneficial when things are simple and just work. Appsheet is a whole different animal and in my opinion, overly complicated for the average user. I think Glide is doing a great job of keeping things simple, while still working on features that provide the widest possible range of capabilities they can. I’ve seen a massive amount of development by the team, and because of that, free users are turning into paid customers. More money, more features. If we allowed Glide to become stagnant, then the use cases would be very limited and there would be less people paying for pro accounts. If Glide was only meant to display spreadsheet data, then I’d be better off just sharing the spreadsheet. I hope like you that they keep things simple and the prices reasonable, but still keep me excited with new features. I get the overall feeling that they’re goal is less big business oriented, and more small user group “dark” apps that may not have a place in an app store. Not saying you can’t go big with your vision, but the little guys are definitely kept in mind.
I always say anything is possible when you think outside the box a little and there is a lot you can do in the back end with a Google sheet, but when it feels hacky, then it doesn’t feel right. Also hate to say it, but sheets aren’t as capable as I wish they were. I have formulas that are not arrayformula compatible, so I end up dragging the formula down instead. I also have multiple sheets to join data, query it, sort it, add more data to it, then unique the whole thing. All with formulas I can’t use with arrayformulas. At some point I’m going to run into limitations do to shear data size or rows that don’t contain formulas. There are scripts to do all of this, but how often does a non-programmer understand scripting. I write enough code during the day. I don’t want to have to do it on side app projects as well.
I don’t expect the world and some request are a little too specific to a use case, but I encourage most feature requests and will offer alternative suggestions when I can. I think Glide will only continue as a business If we allow then to grow and innovate.