What actually happens in that scenario is that one group now writes an adapter on top of SQLite to make it "standardized" to whatever interface you design, increasing the complexity and scope for bugs. To be clear: you're literally reimplementing something that SQLite already does, except probably much worse, in the name of the "standard."
Then that adapter is carbon copied by everyone, because again, nobody is going to reimplement an 80kLOC SQL database as well as whatever 10k LOC parser/lexer/typechecking adapter someone wrote, if they can avoid it. Then everyone just uses that forever, and you're back to square 1, using one implementation everywhere, which is the exact situation standards are supposed to avoid anyway.
The working group was correct to reject a "compromise" like that because that's never how it works out in practice; it's a submarine suggestion from the start. And a big part of this is all because, as evidenced by numerous responses in this thread, modern computer programmers seem to value their own immediate satisfaction and time over literally every other potential concern, no matter how significant.
