The standard tools are great, and I love them - It's not a tool for replacing them. The example above is the simplest one so people would get the concept (I would use wc -l in that case as well). However, once you need more complex stuff (such as the total-size-per-date example), the standard tools are not enough, not to mention expressions on numeric data, limits, sorting by expression, etc. I kindly offer you to read the complete README in the link, maybe it'll change your mind. Thanks.
Look at one of the examples:
q "SELECT COUNT(1) FROM exampledatafile"
The output will be exactly as if we ran the wc -l
I would rather use wc -l