I'm not an expert in databases, but I am starting to think that building an interface primarily designed for humans (that's what SQL is) as the main medium to interact with the database maybe in retrospective was not a winning idea.

I'm not criticising anybody here (I am literally not in a position of critiquing anything); SQL was created probably 40 years ago and it probably made sense back in the times.

My point is that you can always build a human interface from a machine one; the reverse is not that easy. ORMs are a (failed?) attempt to do so.

I would very much push for computer-language integrated query support — (such as Datalog or Linq), and that is what the database server should be accepting as input, instead of a raw string.

Although a lot of people hate MongoDB, I've personally felt way more productive expressing queries with their query document system rather than using SQL.

Fixing design flaws with other software ain't gonna bring us that far maybe.