One person's trash is another person's treasure. Part of the reason SQL has stood the test of time is the very fact that it allows such a high level of abstrac

One person's trash is another person's treasure. Part of the reason SQL has stood the test of time is the very fact that it allows such a high level of abstraction. The big problem that it solved, compared to much of what existed at the time, was that it allowed you to decouple the physical format of the data from the applications that used it. That made it relatively easy to do two things that were previously very hard: Ask a database to answer questions it wasn't originally designed to answer, and modify a database's physical structure without having to change the code of every application that uses it. A lot of "easier" technologies - including, arguably, ORM on top of relational databases - make things easier by sacrificing or compromising those very features that allow for such flexibility. Which speaks to the grandparent's point about technologies that make it easy to get started in the short term, at the cost of having major disadvantages in the long term.