I’ve been wishing for something like this lately in the apple ecosystem: sort of a “plain text” tabular editor that can handle large data sets. Numbers feels like it’s designed for presentations more than data crunching, and Excel (or at least the price of excel) would be overkill for my needs (which largely consists of data cleanup, spot-checking, and quick calculations). I’d happily pay for an IA-Writerish spreadsheet app.
Edit: or maybe Sublime Text is more what I mean. In any case I’m hoping someone will pop in and say, “well why aren’t you Snappets!?” and then I’ll go buy a copy of Snappets.
Educated guesswork: this isn't one particular use case, but a whole bunch of use cases with one thing in common: gene names are put in a table. Excel is the familiar, ubiquitous tool for tabular data.
Is there, perhaps, a market for niche spreadsheet applications that serve one particular market?