Absolutely. I've also seen my fair share of horrendous home-grown "ETL" programs that waste more time shuffling bytes to and from database with poor ORM queries

Absolutely. I've also seen my fair share of horrendous home-grown "ETL" programs that waste more time shuffling bytes to and from database with poor ORM queries in loops, that could be done with a couple half decent SQL queries. Probably the most useful things for me was learning relational algebra in college, and having been thrown on the deep end on a team that was very SQL heavy (not withstanding attempting to debug Oracle PL/SQL syntax errors while pulling your hair out about a missing closing parenthesis -- of which isn't the problem). The usual challenge seems to be fetching data from external services or performing complex business that may conditionally load things -- things that can be awkward in procedural SQL. At the end of the day, you're building a messy ad-hoc dependency graph that is being manually executed very inefficiently. Would be better to just have your code just describe the dependency graph and treat each value transparently as a promise/future and then have a separate engine execute it. Anyhow, something something monads with lipstick, I digress...