I would disagree with this just from the fact that writing data durable code as well as all of the other core ACID things are too error prone. In my perspective

I would disagree with this just from the fact that writing data durable code as well as all of the other core ACID things are too error prone. In my perspective I never felt that it was really there to to faster but was more there to solve the other problems. If it was truly faster people would have stopped using things like ISAM, but they do not since the characteristics are better. There will be overhead and quirks with SQL but an equivalent more direct system would have different quirks perhaps in a different area.