Helpful monks,
You and borisz make get points. However, in my actual production code, I do as much as I can with the WHERE as possible, including lots that I didn't show in my stripped-down example in the OP. However, I am testing for such complex relationships in the rest of the code that I have found it impossible to do it all with the SELECT statement. For the sake of posting on SoPW, I distilled my problem down to the bare essentials, which is why it looks like I wasn't taking full advantage of the SQL language. But thanks for the prompting.