I don't see it as strange. They probably spend lots of time mucking around in SQL trying to force it to things it's not good at, so now they have strong opinions on SQL. They specifically state that it's too late to turn back the clock on SQL, but it's not too late to expose RDMS access with a better language, or with a sufficiently flexible API to allow arbitrary QL implementations. They aren't shitting on anyone here either. They say that the assumptions made when SQL were designed ultimately didn't pan out:

> The original idea of relational databases was that they would be queried directly from the client. With the rise of the web this idea died - SQL is too complex to be easily secured against adversarial input, cache invalidation for SQL queries is too hard, and there is no way to easily spawn background tasks (eg resizing images) or to communicate with the rest of the world (eg sending email). And the SQL language itself was not an appealing target for adding these capabilities.

> So instead we added the 'application layer' - a process written in a reasonable programming language that would live between the database and the client and manage their communication. And we invented ORM to patch over the weaknesses of SQL, especially the lack of compressibility.