Yes but I use MS Excel features like pivot tables and MS Word graphics features like drawing arrows as overlays on top of screenshots to annotate them.

The other limitation of out-of-the-box Org Mode "plain text" architecture is that it limits collaboration of letting other users edit my file because fine-grain locking is not as straightforward as with a db file like SQLite. My "master todo list" is easier to manage if I can let my significant other can enter items for me instead of me doing all the manual data entry myself.

I do understand that since Emacs has Lisp, it can ultimately do anything if you really want to customize/extend/research it.

These are actually not that hard to do in org-mode, if you are willing to use babel and push the pivot out to something like pandas. :D

That said, no, I don't actually think it is a replacement for spreadsheets. Especially not if you are already fluent in them.

Come to think of it, someone should write pivot tables for Emacs. Could be an alternate mode for opening CSV files (which then could also be used when editing code snippets in Org Mode).

(EDIT: In the meantime, I guess you could shell out to https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/manual/datamash.html.)

https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/manual/datamash.html Fixed link

On the topic of commandline spreadsheets; I'm a huge fan of sc(1), a cute curses-based spreadsheet calculator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc_(spreadsheet_calculator)

I'm not sure what you are describing. Note that doing this with python and org is already pretty easy. Or R. No, you don't fully open the csv in org. But, that usually seems a feature. The firehose that is large csv is typically best as a related file.

I'm thinking of the middle-sized use cases. A table with couple hundred to couple thousand rows. Small enough that you can load it into Emacs without a performance penalty, but too large to pivot by hand. Personal and freelance business budgeting come to mind.

However, at this point I'm OK with shelling out to external tool for data wrangling.

That is still easy with pandas/babel. Just set the table as an input for the snippet, and then you can output a pivoted table. (That make sense?)

Yes, it does, and is probably the best option for most people.