Although the barrier to learning Access is lower, there's still a fair bit of work involved. So seeing as you don't have any prior experience in Access, combined with the fact that it's slowly being marginalized, it's probably best to pick a different tool.

Usually, getting a programmer to build your system isn't difficult. The problem is that it's then on you to maintain it. When you need changes or fixes, you need to call in the programmer again. Not only can that get expensive, it can also run into problems if the original programmer isn't available any more, because the next programmer will need to figure out the project (costing you more money). Yes, there are systems and processes to make this easier, but if you're doing a small project with a single contractor, they rarely spend the time to properly document the system.

Where does that leave you? Like you say, you could learn programming. But that's time-consuming. Unfortunately, the software world lacks good tools to help smart non-programmers create small solutions.