The cost of this pains me, and it doesn't help that our campaign manager hates using SFMC's slow / glitchy web app. We have a solid internal data infra and self-built platform, and a highly effective dev team.
I long to just replace the whole thing with SendGrid + React Email/MJML + some cron jobs + a job queue for sequences. And spend that money on a developer's salary.
Has it been done / can it be done / have you done it? Give me some hope (or scare me off!)
Note: I don't intend to actually send the email myself, I'm aware deliverability would suck. For our volume, Amazon SES or SendGrid can do that for ~$10k a year.