> Yet, we claim that it's not the best tool for application developers who are paid to implement value-adding features for their organizations.

You have two options when marrying RDBMS SQL and OO: either mismanage the relational data so that developers can use a class hierarchy, or stop using a class hierarchy to represent data.

IME, applications come and go. They get rewritten, thrown away, obsoleted. The database, however, is there to stay. Mismanaging the data purely so that the application developers don't have to touch all that icky relational stuff almost always results in more work for less returns.