No. Not because it's complicated. Because they wanted higher level facilities for getting/setting data. In other words, they put in abstraction because abstraction is good, not because they are dumb.
I suspect that a big part of the problem with SQL is that it's too abstract: it is both hard to predict how fast a query will run and hard to predict whether the query will continue to run fast as the database changes. A big part of the appeal of things like memcached and Redis is that their performance is not only fast, but also predictable.
No, it's a higher level facility for querying data when you want different result sets back randomly, it sucks most common operations of inserting or updating data.
Forcing me to write a very long statement to insert a row isn't in any way more abstract that saying anObject.save().
SQL continually forces one to write the same boring code over and over. As soon as you start automating the generation of the boring bits, you've started to build an ORM. ORMs exist because programmers get tired of writing the same code again and again.
While SQL is good at what it does, it doesn't do the thing programmers need done most, which is store data structures easily without making them write a bunch of mapping code to translate it first. SQL isn't confusing, it's just frustratingly boring and repetitive.
The people who made the frameworks would require a good understand as well as the idea that an abstraction might make life easier.
The side effect is that if you create a good enough abstraction you'll get people who can handle the abstraction but are a little shakey when dealing with what is abstracted.
See, you can both be right :)
The reason, say, C++ is a good abstraction for machine code is because it simplifies what's going on to the point that you can write something very complex in fewer lines of code, allowing it to fit into the human brain better. I'm willing to be shown examples to the contrary, but ORM layers don't simplify or compress relational queries, they just change the syntax to something more "object-y".
So maybe my point is that abstraction is good, but ORM isn't really abstraction.
Microsoft's Linq for SQL generates mostly OK SQL from your code. While not perfect for all complex operations (like multiple joins with aggregations), the SQL isn't horrible. For most use cases though, the SQL seems to be on par with what I would write myself. Ofcourse this is a rather vendor-specific implementation (for Microsoft SQL Server), but there are decent ORMs out there.
The biggest problem really comes when people don't understand what underlying SQL will be required for specific operations and just write code blindly. This can cause things like the famous nested-loops effect instead of efficient joins, but this is solvable trough knowing how to properly use your tool.
That being said ORMs are good at poking at small amounts of data (single or few objects), while SQL is probably the best language there is for huge set-based operations. When you are doing set-based things, not using SQL will most likely be a bad choice.