We are close to being in perfect agreement. No, spreadsheets were not meant to be batched, which is part of the reasons that attempting to use them in batch processing runs into problems.

However I'd also maintain that Access, and applications used in Access, are also not meant to be batched. As a sample indication of why, consider the tendancy for issues to cause a pop-up to appear which practically demands human intervention. (You can get around that with Win32::GUI, but layering hacks on hacks like that is again fragile.)