I know that's probably the 'best' solution, it's just a matter of skill, time and effort - none of which I really have. The DB I'm working on is effectively a write-once, read-many thing. The 'read' side is pretty much working, I have a framework that I've written in PHP that runs the right queries and spits things out to my CMS in the way I want, and minor things like adding an extra column or two in a table can be catered for with minimum effort. But I'm by no means a competent PHP developer, and that's my best language.
It's the 'write' side that's a pain. The data I'm entering is a mess, it's effectively typewritten lists of varying quality. I've tried using character recognition software with mixed results, but the most reliable way of entering it is simply to type the records in manually. The relationships between the entities are mainly many-to-many, which seems to be the hardest to work with from a data entry point of view. To go back to my movie/actor example, in my case there may be anywhere from 20-100 actors per movie and records for these actors may already exist from previous movies that I've already entered. Complicating matters, there is no reliable unique identifier for the 'actors' in the original data.
So the pain point comes when I add a new 'movie' with 100 actors. Some of those actors may already exist, most probably don't, and the actors may or may not have a pre-defined unique ID. What i'd like is the ability to add a new movie, then for the actors each time I enter the unique ID do a 'join to existing actor record' if the ID exists, or create an entirely new actor record if it doesn't. There are a few thousand movies and probably close to 200,000 actors in total in the data, so anything I can do to simplify or streamline the data entry is going to have an impact. I'm not confident I have the ability to do this with or without the help of a CRUD framework.
My Access DB has got me closest to a solution but it's far from ideal - the subforms for the actor records are pretty easy to set up but I have to manually resolve issues for existing actors, and I have to periodically migrate the data from Access to my current MySQL database. I've looked at a few CRUD frameworks for PHP and other languages but none seems to offer much that would get me close to a solution. I could write my own, but it would take me an age, probably not work very well and would definitely be some horrible web 1.0 monstrosity that would be worse than working with my current Access abomination.