story
We've walked a fine line between fixing bugs, adding the features that our users have asked for and building out the BI interface we think the world should be using in 5 years.
We don't always get it right, and I'm sorry if we broke things for you on the performance side.
We will be spending a few of our development cycles after 0.33 to try to clear out our bug queue.
One specific factual point I'd like to reply to however - SQL isn't going anywhere. If anything we're making it easier to both write plain SQL, use SQL templates or use our graphical interface on top of SQL query results in our next release (preview at https://github.com/metabase/metabase/releases/tag/v0.33.0-pr...)