Thank you for explaining @dinosaur. I'm certain the next incarnation of flume/sbot will be rad, now even more so after seeing that sqlite and such are not excluded out of principle or anything.
I had already been wondering for a while why the ssb ecosystem feels so home-grown, and if I'm the only one who thinks that might be suboptimal. Turns out, the discussion was happening already, I just didn't see it. So now I'm extra happy, and even more excited for the next round of ssb innovation.