These are all really great complaints; and yet I still prefer writing plain SQL to using ORMs and their nifty tricks. I think the main reason is that I don't ever want to have a lot of SQL logic in my code. Short queries (say, 10 lines or less) are okay, if they're one-off and pertain to the function's logic and are never repeated by other pieces of code. But writing complex queries through an ORM layer means they're going to be in code -- and harder-to-maintain -- than if they were where they should be: In views, functions and procedures. ORMs also obscure the execution plan and make optimization more difficult, which in production isn't something I really want to worry about.

Writing SQL is like uploading a program; just like a shader to a GPU. And if the network stopped being the bottleneck, the DB server's load would become the problem. Just like with a GPU, you want to upload your programs and data as infrequently as possible. But unlike a GPU, you have full flexibility to permanently store your logic right there in your SQL DB. If it's well-documented, it's much more streamlined to write views and views-on-views, than to keep all that DB logic in your code. I don't find that it becomes a mess at all, because properly crafted views and procedures strongly encourage forced indexing and checking execution plans when you refactor them; as opposed to in-code, ad-hoc queries where it's hard to know if someone ever ran tests to optimize them.

Some statements do need to be very large, for efficiency. Others are better being broken up into sub-procedures, temp tables or even roundtrips. A great query is a work of art where each part of it is optimized not just for execution plan but also for read/write, network state and expected load. What I like about SQL is the flexibility to decide which way to go, and prioritize based on how often something will be used and what kind of strain it'll place on each of the layers in the stack. As with anything powerful, there are a million ways it can be abused. But what I've found in the ORM space and also with noSQL solutions is that simplicity of use comes at the price of flexibility and control.

[edit] >> null handling is complicated

This would probably also be my biggest complaint about the language itself; the existence of IS NULL / IS NOT NULL and both null-safe and -unsafe comparisons gets confusing (and especially painful if you're trying to write a parser). I think it's one of those things like `undefined` vs `null` vs `false` in Javascript where, on second thought, it's just too late to fix it without breaking half a billion websites.