This stringified approach loses type safety and IDE assistance for what benefit? Why do we want it to look like SQL? A Slick/Quill-like approach seems much safer.
Please read my description (found somewhere in this discussion). That being said: there are scenarios when being able to save a query into a database or config file, then load and run it is useful. In general I agree though and that’s why one of the enhabcements I want to implement is to create a method based syntax with projecting selected fields to a case class.
As for the „why do we want it to look like sql” - I like the syntax and I think it’s much more readable than any other language used to process data. But that’s just a matter of taste :)