For your use case, what if you could use Python in Excel with pandas, numpy and the Anaconda ecosystem readily available? How would that change things?
Disclosure: I was a founding member of the Python in Excel team and am looking for new problems that Python in Excel could solve.
IMO this still doesn't change the fact that Excel is a 2D grid. Dealing with multi-dimensional data will always be tricky in that paradigm. Also, you'll still have cell references, no version control, no access control, ...
Excel is an amazing product and I'm sure people will still use it in 10 years. Our thesis is that for financial planning (and various other number-crunching use-cases) our building blocks make more sense.
Disclosure: I was a founding member of the Python in Excel team and am looking for new problems that Python in Excel could solve.