I wrote this code snippet (you may have to adjust it to match the tables in your database), and within a minute the whole program worked again. Hope this helps someone else, too:

Public Sub RenameAllTables()
Dim dbs As Database
Dim tdf As TableDef
Set dbs = CurrentDb
For Each tdf In dbs.TableDefs
If InStr(1, tdf.Name, "tbl_") > 0 Then ' this way we don't change system tables
tdfName = tdf.Name
tdfNewName = Replace(tdfName, tdfName, "dbo_" & tdf.Name)
DoCmd.Rename tdfNewName, acTable, tdfName

strSQL = "SELECT * FROM " & tdfNewName
Set qdf = CurrentDb.CreateQueryDef(tdfName, strSQL)
End If
Next
End Sub
This uses the workaround suggested by Microsoft - to update a query instead of updating a table.

The code will rename tbl_Customers to dbo_tbl_Customers, then create a query: SELECT * FROM dbo_tbl_Customers. The query is named tbl_Customers

Now anytime your code runs an update to tbl_Customers, it will be updating the query (that selects from the table)!!

MS Access's ACE SQL engine continues to run with a variant form of ANSI-89 with some ANSI-92 features while the rest of the relational database world has adopted more recent ANSI standards and at the very least fully comply to the universal, lowest common denominator standard accepted in the industry: ANSI-1992.

Being a highly used, worldwide database for small to medium-sized shops and its popularity with the Office suite, enhancing Access's dialect to industry standards will add value to current and future users including the Microsoft brand. Even SQLite, a similar, very popular file-level database as open-source counterpart to Access, has a richer, more expressive updated SQL dialect.

Such specific features that would greatly enhance the expressiveness, portability, and efficiency of Access queries would include:

ANSI-1992

- Support of other joins - FULL OUTER JOIN, NATURAL JOIN, and CROSS JOIN; with use of USING clause;
- Support of CASE statements as more enhanced, portable version than IIF() especially for nested logic;
- Support of distinct aggregate functions: COUNT (DISTINCT ...), AVG (DISTINCT ...), SUM (DISTINCT ...);
- Support of wildcards operator, %, in GUI rather than * or use of ALIKE or restricted to ODBC/OLEDB queries;
- Support of CAST for data type changes as opposed to the non-portable C-functions: CStr, CDbl, CLong, CDate, etc.;
- Support of COALESCE for handling of NULL across columns as opposed to nested IIF(..IS NULL) or NZ();
- Elimination of the parentheses requirements for more than one JOIN which often frustrate many new users and require the use of Access GUI's Design View to build complex queries;
- Support of ON clause conditions on single table fields rather than joining tables first and then running WHERE.

Other ANSI

- ANSI-1999: Common Table Expressions (CTE) using WITH clause for more readable, maintainable, and less repetitive SQL code than subqueries and derived tables (supported in SQLite as of version 3.8.3, released 2014-02-03);
- ANSI-2003: Window functions using OVER and PARTITION BY clauses to supplant the domain (DSum, DMax, DCount, etc.) functions with more efficiency than correlated subqueries (supported in SQLite as of version 3.25, released 2018-09-15);
- ANSI-2003: Support for MERGE statement for synchronous UPDATE and INSERT needs based on conditional logic.

Other recommendations

- Support of EXPLAIN <QUERY> to allow users evaluate query operations especially use of indexes;
- Support of CREATE DATABASE as opposed to requiring code for creating .mdb/.accdb files;
- Support of CREATE TABLE AS instead of only SELECT * INTO for clarity of DDL action;
- Support of CREATE VIEW AS instead of requiring code with QueryDefs for creating stored queries;
- Distribute the ACE engine (.dll) as a shared object (.so) with CLI (similar to SQLite) for Unix (Mac, Linux) users (e.g., SQL Server 2016/2017 is now supported on Linux).

With backwards compatibility, above changes is a challenge but such features can be integrated with newer versions of the ACE engine (.dll) to be distributed to users, or with add-on patches, or entirely new Access version.

Additionally, though Microsoft strategically intends to keep SQL Server as its flagship database system and upgrading Access may somewhat interfere with this objective, arguably Access can be situated as a complement and not substitute to the enterprise server RDBMS. Rather than advancing Access’ front end GUI features for use as a complement to Excel, consider strengthening MS Access as a standalone, small-scale database engine product.

Table deign is a huge waste of screen real estate - the field property dialog should be on the right side of the screen, like it is in report and form design, with the drop down button right next to the property's text, not on the other side of the screen. Not a single property is longer than the name of the property choices available, and the ones that could be longer, just bring up the Expression Builder dialog anyway. The idea being to get as much usable information on the screen as possible - like all of my field names and their types. Description really doesn't matter... it's not a Twitter feed.