From my limited Access use, the most time has been spent writing the VBA code to parse through various (ascii, mostly) source files to get the data to load the database with. I think a lot of folks use Acess in this way, since if the data was already available in a nice database format (ODBC "source") then there isn't much reason to put it into Access.

From this point of view, a similar product with a Perl engine for extracting data from the sources would be a great improvement. Perl would also be very good for report generation, as the MS model of sending to word doesn't really cut it for creating reports for machines to read.

All of this is doable now, of course using OLE scripts, but the VBA integration with Access is so much easier in general.

drinkd