This was also the point of COBOL. I think one thing we've learned is non-specialists don't like thinking/problem solving, and there's no meeting them halfway on that. Asking some people to think is asking too much.
I think that's a little too cynical of a view: in years past, I did in fact teach non-specialists to use SQL (against a read-only replica, I'm not crazy) so I didn't have to run all their ad hoc queries for them, and many of them took well to it once they overcame their initial hesitance. The framing that made it click for them was "it's like Excel, but with words."
