There's perhaps an interesting 3rd option aside from full stored procedures vs pure application code transformating data pulled down from database... where the

There's perhaps an interesting 3rd option aside from full stored procedures vs pure application code transformating data pulled down from database... where the processing and transformation is still handled with SQL, but this code and the interaction with the database resides in application code. So instead of triggers and stored procedures, you have database transactions defined in and called from application code.