We think that people struggling with writing good/advanced SQL queries and the existence of ORMs and other heavy frameworks to make RDBMSes "friendly" is a serious problem. And inventing a a new querying language is a necessary step to make relational databases more accessible.
Just to clarify (and I strongly dislike overuse of ORMs)...
Some people use a thing x
A subset of those people use a subset of x called y
This subset of people have built a tool to make y easier to express
Thus x is invalid
I think that's a really bad argument, if everyone was using ORMs then we'd all merrily forget about SQL and just use ORMs which would become the new "language for structuring queries", but we don't all, and EdgeDB in particular thinks that ORMs provide a much degraded expression set from SQL and thus want to tweak X so that it's as expressible as the tool to express Y but without making it just about Y... I think your goal boils down to shifting the trade-off point between X and Y - the extreme of which is writing a very expressive Y that also supports X but in a non-expressive manner.
