It's verbose compared to a lot of other languages simply by using words rather than symbols or abbreviations for most things. Though I tried to convey that I did not think this was a bad thing.

The only case where things get really verbose for me is when I need to do subqueries for columns. Often I might need to run basically the same subquery but return aggregates over different fields, ie sum of net weight, sum of gross weight, sum of value. For performance reasons I can't write that as a join, at least on our SQL server.

I agree there should be a shortcut syntax for joining using foreign keys ("join X on foreign key"?) though.