Well, what the heck are storeprocs other than an "unknown number of programs?"

They are a known number of programs, all written in the same language, and stored centrally. Given a database, it's very easy to extract out all its stored procedures - and its quite easy to find out which tables each stored procedure touches. But if the SQL is scattered around over many applications, written in a myriad of languages, all running somewhere on the network (and for some organizations, the "network" can consist of thousands of machines), it's much harder to get everything updated if the schemas change.