SQL is hard, yes.
I upvoted your post for the rest of it, but I would tend to disagree with that statement (although I have to admit upfront that I am just a SQL user, certainly not an SQL expert). Learning the basics of SQL is quite easy. Yes, advanced SQL queries can be difficult, but not so much if you think about how much work such advanced queries do and how really more difficult it would be to implement the same logic in standard procedural programming (say in C).
But, then, of course, SQL is a form of declarative programming (just as make files, regexes or grammars), you may need some work to get accustomed to this programming paradigm.
