It's not that SQL is all that beastly, it's that most tutorials fail to explain the internals and basics and so you just see all these features and interfaces of the system and can't build a mental model of how the system works.
Well, SQL does come with liberties. I worked with expensive commercial software that destroys the performance of databases by doing everything from complicated ad hoc queries to massive amounts of point reads.
All useful tools can be used incorrectly - and I agree SQL is one of the more frequently misused ones. I think a lot of that is that it's one of the more powerful tools.
