Grist contributor here -

I got onboard 3 years ago right after Dmitry made a demo to me. What truly impressed me right from the beginning was the UI and how easy it was to build advanced views by simply using linking between records. To me, this plus the python formulas and the sqlite storage put together shows great potential to achieve distributed data management properly.

Note that it was even possible at that time to run Grist standalone using electron and to bring your data offline with you. It had been deprioritize and the feature had to be put on the side for a while. But it does not seem to hard to bring it back.