[ghusbands]

> All in all, I would not call this a simplification.

It is a simplification, as it gives you less that you need to understand and decode. Working with a query with ten to twenty joins and join conditions, you have to juggle a lot of intermixed concerns and you probably have to read a lot of query text and table/column definitions. And you have to look back and forth to know which tables are pulled in for checks and which for data. For example, this with just four tables:

  SELECT alpha.*, epsilon.zoo FROM beta INNER JOIN alpha ON beta.id=alpha.foo LEFT JOIN epsilon ON alpha.boing=epsilon.id INNER JOIN gamma ON gamma.id = beta.bar WHERE gamma.baz='bar'

Requires you to understand more about everything and spreads things out more than this equivalent:

  SELECT *, boing.zoo FROM alpha WHERE foo.bar.baz='qux'

(This is based on a real query I was given to work with.)