First, from someone with 25 years of SQL development experience, let me say while it may be true these skills could be learned in a week, most are not learned

First, from someone with 25 years of SQL development experience, let me say while it may be true these skills could be learned in a week, most are not learned at all even by regular practitioners. And as with all such questions I'm judging your comfort with the concepts behind the skills - in this case set theory, conditional logic, data modeling, etc. So it's more how you say it, not what you say it. And yes it's mostly negative signal - most interviews are just to weed out completely hopeless candidates.