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If you are a primarily left-brained individual, I'd say go for it. I would also agree with @SBtrader82, you could probably be up and coding (somewhat) in a few months, and then it's a matter of how much time you want to invest in order to get it all up and running.
I looked at the SC/Spreadsheet system for trading and didn't like it; it felt too limited to me. However, there are a few SC/Spreadsheet gurus around here who could give you better feedback on that.
And keep this in mind: If you hire a programmer... it could get expensive... and you'll probably want that person to work under an NDA... and the never-ending back-and-forth it will take to get what you want... and then you find out the programmer doesn't really know what they claimed to know... and then you have to start all over again... and, well, by the time you go through all that, you could have been well on your way to coding it yourself.
@TremblingHand has gone through a lot of trouble putting together a programming guide for beginners wanting to learn SC/ACSIL. Read through that and... if you wake up with night tremors... hire a programmer!!
Please post any questions and problems or suggestions you have in this thread about my Sierra Chart ACSIL for Beginners to keep that thread reasonably concise and clean of tangents.
IMO, people leave Excel because they want to try a different strategy, or try modifying their strategy.
With spreadsheets, it's easy to paint yourself into a corner, regarding the structure of the sheet. The "easiest" way out of it is to start from a fresh sheet. Doing that can get old quickly.
Coding strategies in a spreadsheet is restrictive, coding in a language allows for more abstractions. The physical location of 'cells' becomes irrelevant.
Using Excel VBA can help somewhat.
Some leave because Excel becomes too slow for them, or they just desire a faster implementation.
After a certain number of rows/columns, Excel may choke.
Going with a platform like NT will be faster to implement, but will cost more. The other extreme is Python. It'll be slower to implement, but basically free ... if you can code.
Also, if you ever what to explore machine learning, you're pretty much relegated to using Python (though other languages can do some ML).
Everyone can take coding courses. Everyone can program a 'hello world' "app." But not everyone will be able to code something worthwhile.
Have you defined what the technical abilities for your tool (whether Excel or not) should be? I didn't see anything about trading for instance overnight in different markets or about the number of trades, etcetera. I'm asking because Excel is not the most stable product out there if your program would need to receive and/or send out lots of data in a very short time frame. Think "choking". It can do an awful lot but it depends on how you operate it. Day trading on your pc for a couple of hours per day is a very different ball game than trading overnight that may require a server setup with optimized uptime. These things do matter.
If you're a light trader and want to invest in yourself going forward you could either learn C# or Python, or take a much easier and cheaper path by choosing a decent open source database like MySQL, put it in the cloud for a few bucks per month, and see how far you get. There's a zillion forums with technical help and IF you have to hire someone at least it's cheapish. Another option could be using TradeStation which is an excellent broker, has all data incorporated, and comes with its own free EasyLanguage code, which from what I've seen is more than a very decent language, supported by quite a community. And if you don't like it in the end a switch to MultiCharts which basically uses the same language is easy.
After having done a lot of research myself about platforms (you may want to read the 2 threads I created) I might go the open source route myself as not to be locked in for any tool of which I won't use 80% or more anyway. If you're a very structured thinker I'm sure you're able to learn how to write basic queries and code within days. The rest comes with playing and investing in yourself before investing in markets.
gotta take the plunge sometime, amirite?
