But sometimes you want to outer join on the ID matching and some other condition, and thats where the JOIN syntax gets more useful, because the 'outer' then obv

But sometimes you want to outer join on the ID matching and some other condition, and thats where the JOIN syntax gets more useful, because the 'outer' then obviously applies to a whole series of logic statements that are and/or'd together. If you write reports its not long before you start hitting really obscure joins and conditions and subqueries and so on.