Oh, SQLite (as a database) is easy compared to a client-server database, or an "embedded" database that runs in a separate process.
The issue is more of the object-relational impedance mismatch that happens when using any SQL database: ORMs can be slow / bloated, and hand-written SQL is time consuming.
I shipped a product on SQLite, and SQLite certainly lived up to its promise. What would have been more helpful was if it could index structured objects instead of rows, and serialize / deserialize the whole object. People are doing this now by putting JSON into SQLite. (Our competitors did it when I looked into their SQLite database.)
The issue is more of the object-relational impedance mismatch that happens when using any SQL database: ORMs can be slow / bloated, and hand-written SQL is time consuming.
I shipped a product on SQLite, and SQLite certainly lived up to its promise. What would have been more helpful was if it could index structured objects instead of rows, and serialize / deserialize the whole object. People are doing this now by putting JSON into SQLite. (Our competitors did it when I looked into their SQLite database.)