The generation before yours is lacking neither intellect nor creativity. We had Calculus in school and the *real* LSD back then.
It's also worth noting that the desired feature set of a spreadsheet is rather universal. Like a paint program, or a music player. Spreadsheets go thousands of years back in human history, and are very well understood as a means and notation for expressing data and expressing calculations over collections. It's not at all a mystery what features will do well in a spreadsheet program.
I've never worked on a spreadsheet program from that side but I have to imagine that the operational abstract of the team centering around how to educate users about how to use the various features they painstakingly develop. It's well known that spreadsheets are difficult to program, because users will inevitable collect larger and larger amounts of data in them, and it needs to do large amounts of calculations very quickly. So right off the bat you already know that a ton of man-hours are sunk into each feature overall, but then you need to really nail down a rock-solid visual grammar and teach the user some sort of intuition for finding these functions as quickly and consistently as possible, lest they get frustrated and leave.
Anyhow. I always find it laughably rude, yet predictable, reading these sorts of comments. As if anybody born before 1980 could have possibly understood the deep enigma of other human beings using computers.
Source: I'm in my 50s.