I get the reason for PL/SQL and completely understand the advantages of stored procedures (I used to write code for Oracle Middleware so have had several years of experience in specifically this domain). I'm just answering the question of why the language sucks to write code for.

I'm not suggesting PL/SQL should be a fully fledged scripting language either (neither Perl nor Python are systems languages by the way). I'm just saying the two paradigms PL/SQL aims to leverage don't combine well so the end result is always going to be ugly.