I think there is a real market need here for Business Intelligence analysts, looking for new tools along with their new datawarehouse (ie. Snowflake).
Alteryx has been around this space for forever and has had great (really astounding) success with their UI. So, I think your idea of keeping the UI but using SQL (to version to control, etc.) makes sense. In the future, it seems totally possible that you add more drag-and-drop functionality that allows non-SQL capable analysts to make queries, join things, filter, etc. (like in Alteryx) but that then actually generates SQL.
From a company building perspective, I think there is an open question whether you need to reinvent the framework yourself or use dbt under the hood (already huge community & permissive license) and simply offer a better/alternative UI targeted at a different audience.
