It's been my experience that most attempts to build abstraction layers on top of SQL are initiated by the programmers themselves, often for just this reason. They (uh, "we", since I've done this too :-) see SQL as lacking in OO goodness, and want to impose our own abstraction atop it.

Perhaps this one of of those cases where there's a "I've implemented my own _____ abstraction" club. The existence of such a club would explain a lot of strange code.