It's true that none of those attempts have created a language that everyone can use, but many of them have lowered the barriers. You might not use Access, but a lot of people do. And a lot of people who can't grok the complexity of C++ can put together simple GUI apps in Visual Basic to accomplish simple tasks.

I'm not suggesting that everyone will ever be able to implement quicksort or write a parser, but there is no fundamental reason that high-level programming will always be inaccessible to the masses.