I don't disagree that SQL can be improved. It's one of the biggest reasons I use Postgres in the first place because there are so many improvements available on top of SQL.
All that said...SQL is pretty darn effective. As a language, it's the true backbone of the internet today. It's readable, explicit, fairly concise and naturally translates to how data should be broken down for efficient storage...or make some trade-offs to allow for more efficient retrieval.
There are differences with different vendor implementations...but that's what different vendors are for - to find things the other guys are doing wrong and improving on them to build a better product.
I wish the folks luck in their work to improve things, but the language I've been able to rely on consistently over the last 17 years or so has been SQL...and I've worked with a lot of languages. SQL is the one that gets the most done reliably and lets me down the least often.
> I use Postgres in the first place because there are so many improvements available on top of SQL.
Most of Postgres is standard SQL. It's just that most non-Postgres databases do not implement standard SQL very well.
I feel like Postgres is so powerful I could damn near build an entire web app backend with JUST Postgres (i'm only sorta kidding here). If that's standard SQL, well then I really like standard SQL :-)