You make some good points. I personally have experience with business web applications, i.e. large complex data models with rather simple updates and report-like queries. These types of queries combined with a well normalized data model map well to set-based SQL. Of course, it's a different story if you're writing technical applications or games that are more about crunching numbers than querying and updating data.

To me, the shitty procedural languages you mention are just for gluing queries together. The important stuff happens in SQL and the simplicity of keeping it all in the database is worth it.