You keep saying what they don't want to, but remember that most users of Excel are not programmers in the traditional sense. I'd wager that most of them aren't even aware of the things you say they don't want.
It's not that you don't need to follow modern software practices. It's that they don't know about them to follow them or not. Further, Excel is almost pure thought stuff. The distance between the user's idea and their implementation is almost as small as we can get without investing in a lot of educational outreach. And then they end up going crazy with macros because they don't know there are other or better ways to do it.
Also, "modern" Excel (not sure which version, maybe 2007 or 2010?) has largely obviated the need for macros with the addition of tables and functions for interacting with them. It turns Excel into a kind of relational database permitting something close to functional relational programming as described in "Out of the Tar Pit" [0].
It's not that you don't need to follow modern software practices. It's that they don't know about them to follow them or not. Further, Excel is almost pure thought stuff. The distance between the user's idea and their implementation is almost as small as we can get without investing in a lot of educational outreach. And then they end up going crazy with macros because they don't know there are other or better ways to do it.
Also, "modern" Excel (not sure which version, maybe 2007 or 2010?) has largely obviated the need for macros with the addition of tables and functions for interacting with them. It turns Excel into a kind of relational database permitting something close to functional relational programming as described in "Out of the Tar Pit" [0].
[0] http://curtclifton.net/papers/MoseleyMarks06a.pdf