Jeff Liebermann wrote in
:

....
It's an INTENTIONAL Microsoft bug. See:

It is certainly popular to blame Microsoft with lots of things, whether
they were responsible or not matters little.

Keep in mind that Microsoft did not 'design' the algebraic operator
hierarchy for Excel, Excel was released with a claim of 100% cell formula
compatibility with the then leading spreadsheet Lotus 123. (Microsoft's
compatibility was so good, it was subject of a famous court case.)

It was much later that Microsoft conceived VBA and added it to their apps.
IIRC, Visual Basic for Applications inherits its algebraic operator
hierarchy from the BASIC language which was conceived around 1964 and
enriched progressively.

The "intentional Microsoft bug" perspective looks like just prejudice.

Owen