You are totally right. We did not want to create a new language and we are trying to keep it as close to SQL as possible. The problem is that SQL lacks streaming constructs you need for temporal joins or creating streams from relational tables. Jennifer Widom's group at Stanford did a lot of work on this (e.g. [1]). We are adding their operators to SQL in a way that is hopefully "easy enough". The rest is just syntactic sugar.
But we are not tied to SQRL and totally open to ideas for making the language piece less of a hurdle.
GPT4 is surprisingly good at writing SQRL scripts with few-shot learning.
You are also right on the schema piece. We are trying to track schemas like dependencies in software engineering. So you can keep them in a repo and let a package manager + compiler handle schema compatibility and synchronization. https://dev.datasqrl.com/ is an early prototype of the repository idea.
[1] Arasu, A., Babu, S., & Widom, J. (2006). The CQL continuous query language: semantic foundations and query execution. The VLDB Journal, 15, 121-142.