We totally hear you that usability and the developer experience is super important, especially when starting out.
One project we launched earlier this year "Timescale Analytics" actually seeks to address exactly this, e.g., bring more useful features and easier programmability to SQL [1] and you can see (or add) to the discussion on github [2].
Also informed by some of the super helpful functions we've seen in PromQL. And by the way, if you are interested in PromQL, we have 100% compatibility with PromQL through Promscale [3], which provides an observability platform for Prometheus data (built on TimescaleDB).