Basic SQL is pretty easy to pick up, especially if you're motivated to get something done. You can get a lot done knowing how to work simple JOINs, WHERE clauses, and some aggregate functions.
Reaching business people from a marketing perspective and talking to them about SQL is a whole different thing, though.
I have the choice between either spending a few days educating them on how to do SQL, or to give them data in a way that they can use the tools they are already familiar with.
I was too busy to do the former.
The other thing is that SQL sucks at creating pivot tables. It is good when you only want to aggregate in one direction. When you want to aggregat in multiple directions (column A by row, column B by row) the syntax becomes tedious to do by hand.