That pretty much describes my career, except it was more than 2-3 weeks. I agree there is value in being familiar with the ins and outs of SQL, but...

> As soon as people get a basic comfort level with SQL, it become almost automatic.

I don't know about that so much. I find that as soon as I need to write something much more complex than a simple select statement I am all but guaranteed to get caught by SQLs many gotchas. Eventually you realize the mistake, and that experience provides the knowledge to know how to correct it, but a good language helps guide you away from being trapped by those mistakes in the first place.

SQL is not a good language. It was clever for its time, but we've learned a lot about language theory in the many decades since. It is a travesty that we haven't put more effort into designing a modern database query language. To use SQL in 2020 is like writing software in COBOL when you could be writing software in Rust. Where is the declarative query language equivalent of Rust, Haskell, etc.?

The NoSQL movement was supposed to be about improving on query languages, but sadly it soon turned into "NotRelational" instead, which killed off any momentum away from SQL that was built.