Pedantically speaking, I wrote Gnumeric not because I loved Excel, or enjoyed using it or because I was trying to be innovative. In fact, I did not even know how to use a spreadsheet at the time.
Gnumeric was the product of the mood in the early days of Gnome: we need to provide this to have a complete desktop offering and we were talented hackers that could get it done. So I did.
Once I started, I enjoyed writing a spreadsheet every second of it. It was both a very educational process, but also the one that made me grow fonder of strict compiler warnings and errors. And from this experience, most Gnome software after this was compiled with warn-as-error.
Gnumeric was the product of the mood in the early days of Gnome: we need to provide this to have a complete desktop offering and we were talented hackers that could get it done. So I did.