I used to love Filemaker Pro back when it was flat in the early Mac days. But I had to learn
VB for a short term career change and the only thing that made it worthwhile was learning and working with recordsets using SQL. I came to love relational db architecture and efficiently moving/showing data around it, dynamically generating combo boxes based on other form selections, etc. Sometimes miss those halcyon days. Access provided a quick and dirty framework for prototyping which is what we did in this case but the prototype has somehow lasted us 5 years now.