Are we supposed to be impressed by this? I'm rather confused. I believe my spending is more fiscally conservative than this guy. Granted I'm not retired, but I don't think he is either given that he appears to be writing articles to promote his websites...
I submit that there was a time and place for these landowners to consider the public access issue on their land - when they bought the land! I would assume they would have done their research and such factors would have played into the price they paid. To change this now is disingenuous.
Fundamentally software development is about writing and managing complex systems. Excel and the like have limited capability to manage complexity and any simple system built with excel eventually turns to bad smelling unmaintainable chaos. So then people build tools that manage complexity better but are still "easy to use". And then those tools become so complex that software developers are the only people who understand how to use them. And then what's the difference between said tool and writing real code? After 10-20 years we are back to where we started. I wonder exactly how many times I will see this in my career?