Despite their undoubted depth of their knowledge and frightening intelligence, those in charge of the T-SQL language at Microsoft often lack recent frontline experience. In this respect, they are less well-qualified to dictate the direction that T-SQL takes...
I simply could not have said it better except that things like the SSMS GUI also fall into that category. The folks on the ANSI board need to listen up, as well.
And who was it that decided on the new Office 2007 menues? What a mess. They claim that it was all due to customer feedback... nothing like a design by a really big committee to really muck up the works.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.