I certainly wished the original developer had not bothered with triggers

I understand your sentiment, that it's a pain to migrate to a database with less functionality than the application currently uses. This is a legitimate problem, and deserves consideration, but I have to disagree with you in the general case. I think it would have been foolish of the original developer not to use triggers, if they were the right tool for the job. (You will probably reply that, in your case, they were not the right tool. That's fine, but I am talking about the general case here.)

Not using all the mechanisms available in a database engine, just for the sake of "portability," strikes me as rather bizarre. That's almost like avoiding the use of map in a Perl program because it does not exist in C. Sure, the application might one day be ported to C, but one shouldn't limit the use of legitimate features based on what might "one day" happen.