What's telling here is that you refactored the individual task into a single query, and nothing outside of that. That's fantastic! You scoped your work into a s

What's telling here is that you refactored the individual task into a single query, and nothing outside of that. That's fantastic! You scoped your work into a small unit and derived a significant impact. You maximized your impact to effort ratio. Notably, you did NOT decide to write your own dialect of SQL to "scratch an itch". Knowing the layer below the abstraction you're working at can be useful at times, but only in relation to understanding the context of how all the layers fit together and making effective, pragmatic decisions. Pointless rewrites are anything but. Good on you for avoiding that impulse and doing the right thing.