SQL seems to be evolving by tacking on features willy-nilly, with no clear holistic philosophy, and worse, the standards which emerged aren't followed by all major implementations and even standards which are followed differ starkly in terms of performance across implementations. The product is that we all write implementation-specific SQL, which largely defeats the purpose of a standard language altogether.

I think if someone came along and fixed these major issues and gave it a modern syntax without significantly degrading performance, it would be sufficiently different that the XKCD "competing standards" meme would not apply.

I would love to hear from someone with database specialization.