What's your proposed alternative that doesn't require hours to start with? Serious question - I believe no programming languages can be applied here. (at least not yet) The barrier to entry must be minimal.
You seem to be asking why people shouldn't do data analysis without knowing anything about data analysis.
I'm saying - we've got lots of people who know the science and do not know or want to know anything about programming. If we want good results, we need to enable them to work better somehow. Proper programming is a good idea for adding to university programs now, so that in ~10 years we can have this talk again and point out that people know better tools and shouldn't be using excel, or at least shouldn't be using it badly.