This reminds me of my experiences learning programming and web development. For a while I used Drupal for everything, because it allowed me to 'program without programming'. The views module (now in core drupal, or slated to be, I think), is essentially a visual query builder.

What I discovered after a while, was that there was a tiny sweet spot where it was nice to do complicated things without writing code, but that it had huge drawbacks. Queries became ridiculous, for one.

And very soon, the stuff I'd build using the Views module was 'complicated' enough conceptually that a normal SQL query would not only be much faster, but easier and quicker to write. The fact that this query could be version-controlled and didn't live in a database was nice too...