Hmm. I guess what I'm getting at is that I typically start building a web app by writing model objects that get turned into db schemas by the ORM (in Python, this is usually the Django ORM or SQLAlchemy), and the ORM turns attribute access into joins (either eagerly or lazily).

So an ORM that usefully interpreted model subclassing etc. and created self-joining tables and could query the resulting model using RECURSIVELY WITH as appropriate would be a real boon.