It’s a good abstraction layer, and a fundamentally good/effecient model of organization and data management. It’s a horrible language, has a meaningless standards doc, some of the worst debugging tooling of modern system and generally any tooling outside of the RDBMS engine itself is 20 years stale.

The only difficult part in arguing this is that RDBMS != SQL != RelationalAlgebra, and it’s very often forgotten

Are we really a minority ? Feels like a lot of people just suffer in silence.

Even though I dislike SQL on many levels, I would be hard pressed to find a better, widely supported alternative. I gave up writing portable SQL and just target PostgreSQL now.