Am I doing something wrong?
Think the real reason is that no one has really ever spent the time to improve the SQL syntax beyond the basics. But the other issue being the lack of syntax. MySQL is different than Postgres, which is different than... You get the idea. Hard to design a syntax around something that is so loosely defined.
To get a good syntax defined someone needs to find a good writeup on the allowed syntax by MySQL, and then Postgres, etc. I stopped when I couldn't even find one for MySQL in the docs.