me too on spreadsheets are challenging in org [but powerful]. i wonder what would make them more intuitive.
i use them infrequently, so i have to re-learn them when i use them. it would be really neat if we could do something like c-c ' that pulls up a more immediately intuitive interface. maybe an ses mode type spreadsheet? for some tasks, some might even prefer a regular spreadsheet whose serialized dot files get stored in an org block. but that would not show the table in org, which you want also.