I really don't think corporate programmers have a problem with sql but more so TSQL or pl-sql.  I think they intuitively have a problem with what is essentially a wrapper language for sql that is using 30 year old language technology (procedural programming).  I have been in multiple environments with several thousands of stored procedures, many of them thousands of lines long.  There is so much boilerplate in tsql and pl-sql that any self respecting programmer will hate it.  It doesn't help that most DBAs are really not data gurus but rather vendor gurus either :/