Easy to debug and write well-tested - mostly yes. Composable is tough though (make sure all your table aliases are unique, that there are no unambiguous column names, that all your ANDs are in place and don't forget that 1=1 to make it easier to uncomment parts. You already need a somewhat sophisticated query builder just to compose multiple JOINs cleanly. Recently I needed to get a query builder-ish thing going with arbitrary number of conditions which should be done as JOINs and the most I could muster to keep it at least a little manageable was a "pkey IN({literal_subquery})". It does compose as in "yes you can do it" but I wouldn't say it composes very conveniently.